


The Violet Hour

by breathedout



Series: Unreal Cities [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: 1920, M/M, Other, Post WWI, Trench Warfare, Witty Banter, casefic, seriously I'm not kidding about the OCs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-16
Updated: 2012-05-21
Packaged: 2017-11-03 18:17:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 58,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/384405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In 1920, two years after the end of the Great War, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson investigate two disappearances, eerily similar but separated by 80 years. In the process, they make enemies (and friends) of Bloomsbury intellectuals; travel to Sussex; deal with the aftermath of John's past in the trenches; read Victorian pornography; drink copious amounts of tea; and, of course, fall in love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Lilacs out of the dead land

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Polski available: [Fioletowa godzina](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8264399) by [Pirania](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pirania/pseuds/Pirania)



> Fair warning: This is, at its heart, a John/Sherlock romance. That said, there is also a LOT of original plot and MANY original characters, some of whom are a) based on real historical people; b) involved in sex scenes, and/or c) female. If any of that will bother you, give it a pass. 
> 
> Many, many thanks to [sesetre](http://sesetre.livejournal.com/) for awesome ongoing beta work, and to [fortun8te](http://fortune8te.livejournal.com) for beta and britpicking. You two are amazing helps! Also thanks to [Emma de los Nardos](http://emmadelosnardos.tumblr.com) for consultation on psychology and psychopathology. 
> 
> Work title and all chapter titles are from Bloomsbury Group member TS Eliot's _The Waste Land_.

 

***

 

Wednesday, 15 June 1920  
  
Dear Mr. Holmes,  
  
I would be very grateful if you would allow me to speak with you about the disappearance of my daughter three nights ago. I must tell you I am a working woman and I haven't much to offer in return, but one of the girls in my current place of employment is forever going on about you and the work you did for her family and took no payment, and indeed I don't know where else to turn. People will say cruel things about a girl like Callie but I know my daughter and there is something wrong if she was not on her train. The police will do nothing until two weeks have passed and I expect not even then.    
  
Tomorrow is my half-day off from service and I will call on  you at your offices on Baker Street.  I hope to find you in.  
  
Sincerely,  
Mrs. Bridget Summerson

 

***

 

"Tedious!" was Sherlock's initial verdict on the Summerson case. "Dull!" was his second. He continued to decry the unbearable dreariness at regular intervals all that morning, and odds are that if Mrs. Summerson had had more flexibility with her days off, or better access to the return post, or if the slow drip of correspondence at 221B had been upgraded to a trickle, she would never have been shown into their sitting room at all.    
  
Which just goes to show that lines of causality are sometimes too complex to trace, even for the great Sherlock Holmes.  
  
Because even now, years later, whenever Dr. John Watson wants to take his partner down a notch, he need only mention Sherlock's stubborn reluctance to accept this particular case, and the detective's manic petulance will still into thoughtfulness, almost melancholy.  A useful trick, John thinks, though truth be told he usually refrains from using it. Subduing Sherlock sometimes seems oddly like breaking him.    
  
In those days, of course, brokenness was all around them. Everything was newly shattered in the aftermath of the Great War, gaping wide and not yet grown into the familiar shapes it would later take.  Three years before the Summerson case, John had spent his days choking and cursing, kicking paths through trenches glutted with flesh and thick with mustard gas. Some nights, asleep, he was still there, still Captain Watson caught in a gruesome parody of hospital rounds, chasing a thready pulse in cold after warm after cold comrade while the detonations sounded all around him. Other nights, more often, he was just John, sitting up with Private Daniel MacIntyre in a train compartment or a fetid tent of a field hospital, while Daniel ranted with tears in his eyes about gondolas and gold, and the dire responsibility of artists to feel, to recognise — " _that's what no one bloody understands!_ " he had shouted — and John had run his fingers over Daniel's skin with numb perseverance, trying hopelessly to locate the source of the wrongness so that it could be pulled back out of Daniel's body, so that Daniel might recognise John or at least so that John, looking straight into his face, might recognise Daniel.  
  
In comparison to the world around him, then, John Watson had escaped the carrion fields remarkably unscathed. He supposed he should feel lucky. He didn't. Most days, for months after the Armistice had been signed and he had been made his way home with a bullet wound to the shoulder, he succeeded in feeling nothing at all: which was probably, he supposed, for the best. He knew vaguely that the insulating gauze of his reprieve would one day wear through, and when this thought occurred a thin stream of dread would trickle down the inside of his skull and chill him. What had he become, under the dressings? He was easier in control, not knowing.  
  
And so it was a stroke of luck that, just as those protective layers were thinning out, allowing jolts of surprise and rage and desire to spark unpredictably at John even during waking hours, he had been swept into the orbit of Sherlock Holmes — at which point the current in his own mind had been subsumed by quite another. Life with Sherlock was adrenaline and astonishment, magic revealed as manic logic, better living through the dead. A boyhood of reserved Scottish pragmatism had fitted John well for the role of social anchor and foil to Sherlock's brilliant volatility. Together they were just dangerous enough to be elating, and just disturbing enough to seem real, and so captivating that John was almost able to block out certain burgeoning realisations. Things like: gauze was laughable shelter in an electrical storm. Like: every day in the presence of the voice and the skin and the long limbs of his friend was soaking him through with silver. Like: Sherlock was a cataract of current.

 

***

 

Bridget Summerson braved the lintel of Baker Street at two the following afternoon, a stocky black-Irish woman with skin scrubbed ruddy, twisting in her hands a straw hat with a battered red flower.  Sherlock, having agreed with ill grace to remain for her visit, stretched languidly on the chaise longue, then glanced over and quirked an eyebrow. "And you're positive, are you, Mrs. Summerson," he drawled, "that your husband is not responsible for your daughter's disappearance?"  
  
Theatrics. John sighed, putting down his pen and reaching for the teapot; prepared to smooth the waters.  
  
Mrs. Summerson's eyebrows rose, but her shoulders squared as well. "I don't know how you know about Michael, Mr. Holmes," she said, slight brogue to her voice, "but Edie's told me what to expect from you, so I mustn't pretend I'm shocked. Like a medium, she said, and no mistake."    
  
Sherlock rolled his eyes. "No need for spiritualism, Mrs. Summerson, just a series of simple —" but she cut him off with a raised hand.  
  
"You're right that my husband has a temper. I won't deny it. And if Callie was here she'd tell you there was never any love lost between him and her. Things got downright nasty for a time last year, both of them in their cups and going at each other like wild beasts some nights. I tried to keep them apart, but most times it was no good. You see, Mr. Holmes, I haven't come here to play sly or cagey. You'd find out sooner than later about Callie's past, if you couldn't tell it just by looking in my eyes or at my knuckles or whatnot."  
  
Sherlock, miffed at being deprived of an opportunity to air his deductions, offered no response.  So John slid into character: smiled, said they appreciated her forthrightness. Got her seated and offered her a cup of the Earl Grey. She sipped once, twice, before returning to the attack.  
  
"A year ago, Mr. Holmes, I was in despair over my daughter. She'd got herself a factory position when she was sixteen, but two years ago she gave it up again sudden, no explanation. Hung about with actress types — well, we hoped they were actresses. Came home drunk more nights than not. I hate saying it, but that's the truth. I couldn't bring myself to ask about men she might've been seeing. And I don't believe," she continued sadly, "that Scotland Yard will think too long or hard about such a girl as that, do you? But they would be wrong, you see."  
  
"Because of, what?" spat Sherlock. "The eternal possibility for human redemption? Don't waste my time."  
  
"No," retorted Mrs. Summerson, colouring up. "Because a year ago, that all changed." She nodded emphatically; Sherlock rolled his eyes but gestured his permission to continue.  
  
"A year ago, Mr. Holmes, I swear, Callie straightened up. I don't know what caused it but there truly was such a change, ask anyone who knew her. Suddenly I never saw her with her old friends; I seldom saw her drunk. What a blessed relief it was. But she said it was still so hard, with her father as he was, and everyone from that bad life around her, and she said — she said she just needed to make a fresh start. And she'd answered an advertisement for a position down in Sussex. West Lavington the village is called, you probably don't —"  
  
"I am familiar with the area," interrupted Sherlock.  
  
"Well then, you'll know it's a little country place, on the edge of the Downs. Not too far from London, but far enough to make a clean break. Of course I wished she'd stay close, but what could I do? I could see it was for the best. And so off she went, and she's been there ever since, kept on as girl-of-all-work at the church there. This was to be her first week home, but she never arrived."  Mrs. Summerson fished in her handbag, brought out a letter, passed it to John. He glanced at the note, which was addressed in a haphazard script and announced that Callie Summerson planned to arrive in London the previous Saturday, on the 6:40 train.  
  
"They say she hasn't been seen in the village since Saturday, either. No one saw her board the train, but they might not have in the regular course of things, anyway. She wrote regular every few days all this past year, even sent a bit of money home," Mrs. Summerson continued earnestly to John, who passed Callie's letter to Sherlock. "I just can't believe she would have done that if she'd taken back up with her old —"  
  
A sharp inhalation surprised her into silence; suddenly Sherlock was languishing no longer, but sitting upright, staring at the letter.  
  
"Mrs. Summerson," he said. "You failed to mention that your daughter's given name is not Calliope or Caroline, but…"  
  
"Caldonia," she supplied, looking a bit lost. "I know it's unusual. My aunt Caldonia is Callie's godmother. Now they hardly see each other, of course; we none of us have the money to make the trip."  
  
"And does your family, by any chance, have a history in the South of England? No," Sherlock answered himself, scanning her face, "I thought not."  
  
"No," she agreed, looking mystified. "As far as I've ever heard, my husband and I are the first to cross over. All my other family are still in Dublin. Why does it matter, then?"  
  
Sherlock sprang from the chaise longue, hand extended. "It means, Mrs. Summerson, that I must thank you for bringing such an intriguing problem to my attention." Mrs. Summerson, flummoxed, let his hand hang in the air unshaken for several seconds before rising hurriedly to her feet and extending her own. Sherlock's smile widened, became the ingratiating mask John had sometimes seen before. "Good," he said, "good then."  
  
And suddenly the detective was a flurry of movement and rapid speech. "May I keep this letter for the time being? Excellent. That way we have a record of your address should we need to reach you, and also a reminder of your daughter's place of work." He was herding her none too subtly back toward the front door, his hand on her shoulder. "Madame, we will be in touch."  
  
Mrs. Summerson was still stunned by this sudden Holmesian about-face from bully to benefactor. She allowed herself to be bundled out of the flat with a minimum of effort from Sherlock, who waved her across the threshold with a flourish John thought frankly overdone. The detective reentered the sitting room buzzing with anticipation and self-satisfaction.  
  
"And what, Holmes," John said, when he was sure Mrs. Summerson was well away, "was _that_?"  
  
Sherlock picked his way over to what was surely the least conveniently-placed of all the myriad piles of paper dominating the flat, and began to sift through it with great purpose. John supposed that these piles must represent some obscure filing system plain to Sherlock's eyes, though to him they remained baffling. He had occasionally, when things were dull in the flat, rummaged through the stacks in idle curiosity, but they seemed a random mélange. A pile topped with an 1883 bill of sale for a starter-flock of Blue-Faced Leicester sheep, for example, might go on to disclose a 1904 _carte du soir_ from La Fermette Marbeuf in Paris (bisque de langoustine and tartare de boeuf featured prominently); clippings of reports on the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1920 (criminalised cocaine and smoking opium without a prescription), and a bound book of woolen suiting swatches (1912 winter season). John shook his head, clearing it as Sherlock rummaged.  
  
"I have to thank you," Sherlock said from amongst the piles, "for insisting we see her. Her daughter's case is thoroughly self-evident, of course, but as a whole the problem is quite intriguing. _Quite_ intriguing. Aha," he added, emerging with a worn and dusty bound volume, and collapsing with a huff in his regular armchair. John eyed him expectantly, gestured at the album, which Sherlock held on his lap and almost petted, but did not open.  
  
"I think I told you once, that when we were children Mycroft and I would sometimes be sent to stay with my grandmother, in Sussex?"  John nodded. Sherlock went on, "She lived in the town of Horsham, not thirty miles from the village where Miss Summerson disappeared."  
  
Sherlock looked more pensive than John would have expected, given the man's wild exhilaration of a minute before. There was a pause before he continued.  
  
"My grandmother was remarkable, Watson. One of the only people in my childhood who. Well. She had a certain amount of insight. She was artistic, French originally, and she was good with. With people. Well-disposed toward them." He let out a rueful laugh. "She'd kept up with this album for years, her whole life really, so it wasn't made specifically for me, but she let me look at it when I was ill or I needed to be — occupied."  
  
He eased the cover open, holding the weight of the boards so that the aged leather bindings were unstressed. Upside-down, John could make out a wide assortment of printed matter — plain yellowed paper in the early pages of the book, quickly supplanted by newsprint — that had been cut out of their original contexts and fastened into the leaves of the album. Sherlock turned the pages with the kind of tenderness he usually reserved for the addition of a catalyst to a reactive chemical compound.  
  
"I pored over these clippings religiously as a child," he told John, as the pages turned. "I never saw the use of committing poetry or scripture to memory, but this — I could have been catechised on this book, from seven or eight onward."  
  
"They're unsolved cases?" asked John.  
  
"Of a sort. They're not all what you and I would call _cases_ these days, more an aesthetically pleasing collection of small mysteries, curated with an artist's eye. My grandmother had a sense of narrative, of balance, of the suggestive power of details. Some of these clippings are more whimsical than criminal. There's one about the sudden appearance of several crates of unclaimed Scots Grey roosters at the Henfield train station in 1867, for example. Kicked up an awful racket, apparently. And some stories, I think, she chose for the simple force of their tragedy, like the one from 1875 in which a group of drunken Kirdford men froze to death one night, wandering about hypothermic less than half a mile from one of their homes."  
  
"Christ."  
  
"Other entries are genuinely unexplained, though. Those were always my favorites as a child; it won't surprise you that I tried to piece together what had really happened, though in most cases the evidence in the reports was frustratingly sparse or irrelevant.  Ah," he said, turning a final page and letting the album stay open at a point toward the chronological beginning of the clippings, just after the transition to newsprint. "Here we are." He turned the book toward John.  
  
The clipping Sherlock was pointing out was dated 7 September 1841, and concerned the disappearance of a young woman named Charlotte Whitmore. To John's eyes, the report offered little to connect the event with Mrs. Summerson and her daughter. In 1837 Miss Whitmore, the younger daughter of passably successful York merchants, had traveled all the way to West Lavington to act as nursemaid and helper to an aunt whose health was in decline. The niece had been twenty-nine at the time; probably, mused John, the extended family considered they were doing the old maid a favour by offering her room and board in exchange for easy servitude. Acquaintances, the clipping said, reported that Miss Whitmore had seemed content, and had acted normally right up until her sudden disappearance. Her aunt and uncle bid her goodnight on the fifth of September only to find her bed empty and made up on the morning of the sixth. Her brief note contained apology and farewell, but no explanation.  
  
The article went on to note that Whitmore had been liked and respected throughout the town for her organizational leadership at the annual flower show, her volunteerism at the medical clinic, and her regular attendance at the church services of Deacon Manning, with whom she had apparently become something of a favourite. One village woman, indeed, seemed to blame Manning for Whitmore's disappearance — and here John's eyes stuttered to a halt. Widened. Raised. Locked with Sherlock's. John shivered.  
  
Sherlock's grin was vulpine.  
  
John returned his eyes to the page, read out the passage. "Many were surprised to learn that Mrs. Caldonia Shuttleworth, respected wife of Reverend James Shuttleworth of Midhurst village, holds Deacon Manning responsible for Miss Whitmore's disappearance. 'It is scandalous for a trusted authority to so abuse the confidence of an innocent soul like Charlotte,' the matron said. 'Her friends all know she has been horribly used in this business.' Pressed for greater detail, Mrs. Shuttleworth declined to comment."  
  
"Quite a coincidence, isn't it?" Sherlock asked, eyebrow cocked. "Two disappearances of two seemingly unrelated young women from the same village — the same _church_ —, eighty years apart, and in both cases a Caldonia was involved. Not exactly a common name. As I said," he repeated, leaning back in his chair, " _quite_ intriguing."  
  
"That's — that is something," said John, thinking it through. "Seems like in implausible coincidence."  
  
Sherlock's mouth contorted, as if the sound of the word 'coincidence' left a bitter taste.  
  
"But still," pressed John, "how do we go about investigating a disappearance when the trail has been cold for eighty years? I assume you must have researched any follow-up reports in your school days, if you found this album so riveting?"  
  
"I did. Practically no word on Charlotte Whitmore appeared after this notice, even in the local rags. As she left a note, I doubt there was even a criminal investigation. Luckily, the yellow hordes have been less reticent about her esteemed Deacon."  
  
"You want to look into the Cardinal Manning connection?"  
  
"It is suggestive that a friend of the young woman in question saw fit to blame Manning for the disappearance, however vague her terms. An older man — a figure of religious authority — and a young, unmarried woman?"  
  
John frowned. Henry Manning, object of Caldonia Shuttleworth's unexplained wrath in 1841, had certainly garnered greater fame than anyone else involved in the small-town mystery. By forty years after Charlotte Whitmore's disappearance, his history included defection from the Church of England, appointment as a Catholic Cardinal, and widespread recognition as one of the great social reformers of his generation. John could still remember, as a boy of six or seven, being lifted on his father's shoulders to peer over the crush of black hats and coats at the extravagant funeral procession inching through the frozen mist toward Kensal Green. The Watsons were Scots Presbyterians, not Catholics, but even so the family had risen before dawn and bundled themselves against a seeping January fog to pay their respects. Every cab had been taken and the underground was overrun, and so they had walked the eight miles from John's father's Stepney practice, where they had lived among the dock workers who were his patients, to stand in the press of onlookers in Harrow Road. John, remembering the atmosphere of adulation that day, considered the likelihood of locating a trustworthy enemy of Cardinal Manning's in 1920.  
  
"Er," he said. "Yes. At this point, though, he's considered next door to a saint, isn't he? Champion of the working man. I mean, even if he did turn to Rome, which I know is a strike against him for plenty of people, it's not as if a biographer or a church historian is going to want to go into the circumstances of an obscure woman's disappearance early in his career. That type are a bunch of bloody hagiographers."  
  
"Exactly," confirmed Sherlock. "An able summary." John raised his eyebrows, waiting for elaboration; Sherlock smirked. "We have no use at all for _that kind_ of historian, not the _Dictionary of National Biography_ sort. Luckily," Sherlock continued, getting to his feet, "we have another option."  
  
"Oh yes?" asked John, bemused. "What's that?" Sherlock was gathering to himself that forcefield of exuberance that signaled a game afoot; he threw John's trilby at the armchair with a wide grin.  
  
"Scurrilous gossip, John! Invaluable for our purposes. You must have been out of the city to have missed the fuss in the press over _Eminent Victorians_ two years ago. 'The last nail in the coffin of Victorian sensibilities,' according to someone or other at the _Times Literary Supplement_. And our man Manning was first on the chopping block."  
  
John's eyebrows rose further. "Since when do you keep up with the latest literary developments?"  
  
"Only when they become scandalous or divisive enough that they might end in crime. And believe me, Mr. Strachey's work definitely qualifies."  
  
"Does it." John was smiling, getting to his feet, Sherlock's enthusiasm catching.  
  
"Had Mrs. Humphry Ward died of apoplexy brought on by writing her review, her heirs might have made a case against Mr. Strachey for endangering her health."  
  
John chuckled. "Right, where do we find this scandal-monger? Are we going to Sussex?"  
  
Sherlock checked the mantel clock. "After a brief excursion to Hampstead," he replied, "I believe we'll be just in time for an evening in Bloomsbury."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Huge, huge thanks to [Ninette Aubart](http://ninetteaubart.tumblr.com/) for designing the beautiful book cover! I am gobsmacked. :-) Fonts used are CatShop by [Peter Wiegel](http://www.peter-wiegel.de) and Before the Rain by [Måns Grebäck](http://www.mawns.com). Both are available at [dafont.com](http://www.dafont.com).
> 
> 2\. To clear up any confusion about real versus fictional people: Cardinal Manning and Lytton Strachey were both real people, though in this story they do fictional things. _Eminent Victorians_ is a real book. There was a real-life Mrs. Shuttleworth, political enemy of Cardinal Manning, but her real name was not Caldonia and my version of her is for all intents and purposes totally fictional. Everyone else in this chapter (except Mrs. Ward) is fictional.
> 
> 3\. Mrs. Humphry Ward was a prominent and non-bohemian journalist and book reviewer who wrote a negative piece on _Eminent Victorians_ in 1918.


	2. I shall rush out as I am, and walk the streets

***

 

Thursday, 16 June 1920  
  
My dear Lytton,  
  
Marjorie tells me you are off with Maynard for the evening, which I shrewdly suspect means plentiful claret at Number 46.  Much as I expect the bearer of this letter to antagonise and be antagonised by you in turn, I will ask you to remember that Mr. Holmes is the very man who so cleverly cleared our Pippa's name after that regrettable incident two years ago at the Suffrage meeting in Trafalgar Square.  I would therefore beg you to accommodate his present queries, and if Vanessa's incorrigible staff can be prevailed upon to produce two additional suppers, you may inform her I would be obliged.    
  
Your loving mother,  
    Lady Jane Strachey

 

***

 

Hampstead Heath was putting on a rare display of vernal loveliness. The late afternoon sun honeyed the pondwater and lengthened the shadows of quaking poplars on the green, and John Watson, as he climbed into yet another musty cab for the ride to Bloomsbury from Belsize Gardens, couldn't quite staunch his reluctance to abandon the crisp evening air in favor of a night spent coaxing information on Victorian clerics out of a group of bohemians.    
  
Bohemians, however, were apparently the order of the day.  One look at Sherlock's profile left no doubt that his initial lack of interest in the case was long forgotten. Their encounter with the formidable Lady Strachey behind them, Sherlock's face had relaxed out of its society smile and into the still, inward-focused repose that signified rapid thought, not to be interrupted.  John sank into the seat facing and watched, unobserved, as the dappled sunlight flickered over his friend's lips, his cheekbones, the base of his long throat. Time got a bit lost. When the cab gave a jolt John looked out the window and thought, uneasily, that it was Sherlock at crime scenes who had taught him how watching could be touching performed with the eyes.  
  
Sherlock stirred, changed the direction of his crossed legs.  
  
John cleared his throat, still looking out the window, and reached for words. "I admit this is interesting, this Manning connection," he said, "but isn't Miss Summerson's disappearance a bit more urgent? Shouldn't we be, I don't know, running down to Sussex?"  
  
"Dull," Sherlock said, waving the words away. "Miss Summerson is hardly the main point of interest here. And in any case, I put the Yard onto her before I even knew her name."  
  
"You — pardon?"  
  
Sherlock looked mildly surprised. "You were _there_ , Watson, did you not pay attention? Not that he’ll listen to me, but I distinctly recall telling Lestrade to increase his undercover presence in and around Limehouse. What other conclusion could you possibly draw?"  
  
"Holmes, Callie Summerson is from Spitalfields and hardly a sailor," he spluttered, and Sherlock made a noise of disgust in the back of his throat, rolling his eyes and plainly unwilling to explain himself farther.  
  
And then the cab was pulling up to the walk in front of 46 Gordon Square, and Sherlock was descending on the door and straight into the arms of a harried and wine-soaked young man who was just rushing out of it.  The man startled palpably at the collision; Sherlock, taken aback, almost dropped him; John sidestepped, grabbed his elbow.  "Oh of all the impossible —" the man exclaimed, and then, drawing himself up and addressing himself to a vague spot somewhere between the two mens' shoulders, slurred, "I mean to say, _thank you, kind sirs and valiant protectors_ " and descended into a fit of the giggles.    
  
After a brief pause Sherlock ploughed on, undeterred. "We're looking for Mr. Lytton Strachey," he said to the youth. "Is he inside?"  
  
"Who, _Lytton_?" The young man pulled himself up and looked blearily from one man to the other. "Got himself into a bit of _trouble_ did he?" His tone was rising steadily, swiftly approaching a shout. "Well, _proceed_ , gentlemen, you're _welcome_ to him, I'm sure.  You can take _Maynard_ and _Duncan_ away as _well_!"  This last directed at top volume toward the upper windows of the building, as the speaker gestured extravagantly with his arm, knocked himself off-balance and nearly fell over into the gutter.  
  
"Yes," said Sherlock, eyebrows climbing but voice impassive, "thank you," and left the man swaying on the kerb.    
  
The scene inside Gordon Square was hardly less chaotic.  They were greeted at the door by a breathless woman with fly-away hair over a cream-colored caftan, who led them through corridors painted with sinuous male bathers in states of undress. Masses of antimacassars adorned dark, chintz-covered furniture, and through the two doors they passed John could see more men and women in flowing pastel garments, wine glasses in hands. Their guide spoke in a soft, low rush devoid of full stops but giving the impression of an occasional semi-colon.  
  
"— _do_ comeinMrHolmes, I see you met Sebastian outside and I'm Vanessa; Lady Strachey phoned ahead to say you would be stopping by and you must forgive the confusion; only Maynard has reset all the clocks in the house as a kind of, well, joke I suppose, and the servants are all in rebellion, he refuses to turn them back, the clocks I mean, he gets so stubborn sometimes and we're being denied supper until it's been set to rights; Lytton proposed to read out Maynard's _Treatise on Probability_ down in the kitchen until they dished up out of sheer boredom, but —" and here she was interrupted by an attenuated figure in tweeds, spectacles, and a reddish beard, who shuffled in, hand outstretched, and spoke in a high, clipped voice.  
  
"— I was outvoted. On the admittedly sound rationale that one of us would have to devote himself to the actual reading of the thing.  Lytton Strachey, _ma mère_ telephoned to say I might have the pleasure." A handshake between the tall men: two assemblages, John noted, of sharp angles and long, tapered fingers.  They were lucky not to cut each other with hands like those, like softening blades. He was unable to look away.  
  
"Sherlock Holmes. And this is my partner, Doctor John Watson."  John took Strachey's hand in turn, dragged back to attention.  "I was wondering," Sherlock said, "if I might question you about one of your recent biographical subjects. Facts have come to light suggesting that Cardinal Manning —"  
  
Here they were interrupted again as an odd little man in a city suit staggered across the floor toward Strachey. He looked and smelled as if a tree frog had been marinated for weeks in a medium-grade Bordeaux, then taxidermied on Savile Row.  
  
" _Doc_ tor!" the newcomer cried, draping himself over Strachey's shoulders and leaning toward John as Strachey rolled his eyes and Vanessa gave a kind of half-sigh, half-giggle.  "Is it true? Has a _doctor_ come to contemplate with us the nature of life and love?"  John, taken aback, said nothing. The man turned his head and continued shouting, despite his supporter's ear being all of three inches from his mouth. "What was it — what was it you said about medical men, Lytton? 'More desperately moral even than clergymen'?"  He hiccuped slightly, swayed toward John, leered. "'R'you going to convince us all to be healthy and moral?"  
  
"Doctor _Watson_ ," cut in Sherlock, glaring at the drunk man and suddenly icy, "was at two Battles of the Somme. I would not categorise him as 'desperately moral.'"  
  
"No," choked John, fighting laughter, "just somewhat moral, I suppose." A sharp glance from Sherlock, who apparently did not find the situation amusing.  
  
"A _soldier_!" the man groaned, running a hand sloppily down John's lapel and latching onto it, "a lovely blond...blond...soldier, Lytton." He was being held forcibly upright as he flailed about after his train of thought. "Just like yours!" he continued, inadvertently punching Strachey in the ribs. Then he was leaning closer to Sherlock, attempting a whisper. "Lytton _lives with one_ , you know. Ralph. He's just in — just in the other —" The man gestured wildly at the drawing room they had passed on the way in, almost capsizing in the process. Sherlock turned from the spectacle, hands raised in disgust. Strachey steered his charge back into an upright position.  
  
"Yes, well, Maynard. These days, sadly, I get more use from a doctor than a soldier.  Even a _blond_ soldier, I regret to say," Strachey added, with another roll of his eyes toward John. "Er," he added, as an afterthought, "Maynard Keynes, Sherlock Holmes and Doctor John Watson." Strachey's attempt at a gracious gesture to accompany this introduction was thwarted by the continued need to support his charge as Keynes reached over to maul at John's lapels again.  
  
"Mr. Holmes," said Vanessa, stepping in before Keynes could do any more damage, "Dr. Watson, I propose we brave the kitchens.  Meat and bread and some _coffee_ —" here a pointed glance at Keynes —"should be within our limited capabilities."  
  
Thus, fifteen minutes later, most of the sixteen occupants of 46 Gordon Square had chased the outraged servants out of the basement kitchen and relocated there with heaps of cushions, washing down cheese and brown bread with either claret or coffee, depending their states of sobriety.  Vanessa and Strachey had made an attempt to transfer the necessary food items to the more formal dining room, but the physics of hospitality pull inexorably toward kitchens, and in the end it was enough of a challenge wrangling Keynes into an upright position without shepherding the other guests as well.    
  
Sherlock had not intended to conduct his questioning in the presence of an audience, but it was becoming rapidly apparent that needs must. He could be, when necessary, an extremely patient man, but he saw no unobtrusive way to separate Strachey from his hangers-on, not without reactivating this Keynes's drunken fumbling at John's lapels — an idea Sherlock found oddly offensive. What's more, Strachey appeared to be the natural conversational center of the gathering, which allowed for the direction of the talk toward Cardinal Manning.  By the time Sherlock focused Strachey on the period surrounding 1841, the biographer was settling in with the distinct air of a grandfather regaling his young charges with a favorite fairy story.    
  
"Well, that would have been," he said, "just before the old windbag was appointed Archdeacon of Chinchester. He nearly missed out on that appointment, you know." He cleared his throat, looked at Sherlock over the tops of his spectacles.  "How much do you already know about the Oxford Movement, Mr. Holmes?"  
  
"A collection of Victorian clerics hovering on the brink of Catholicism, weren't they?"  
  
Strachey was nodding slightly. "Yes indeed," he said. "And the material _point_ , is that 1841 was rather a pivotal year for the Movement. Things had become decidedly," he savoured a pause, " _casual_ , in the years before the coronation, but these Oxford men were the new generation. The new, painfully _earnest_ generation. And they were getting people excited again about religion, matrons fainting in the aisles, vicars rediscovering their callings. But also, well, ruffling a few feathers along the way. It has never been difficult to incite nervousness in the British populace about the menacing predations of Rome. That Oxford lot could be _serious_ all they liked, but cross the line into _Catholic_ and well. Heads would roll.  
  
"So: was Oxford a wave about to crest and carry its adherents into power? Or the scandal of the decade ready to disgrace anyone too close? Your man Manning was a politician. He let himself be tied to the Movement in the popular imagination, but never too securely, you understand. No press, no sermons on the topic, no official statements one way or the other. You're no doubt familiar with his type."  
  
Sherlock nodded; several other guests raised their glasses in dour salutes.    
  
"That same year," Strachey continued, "Old John Henry Newman, the leader of the Movement, put an end to his political career when he tried to claim that nothing about membership in the Church of England truly prevented adherence to Catholicism. Utter twaddle. The Church was in an _uproar_ , you can imagine. A few months later Manning denounced the fellow as a Papist from the pulpit of Newman's own former church.  
  
"But the _interesting_ thing," added Strachey, leaning forward with conspiracy in his tone, "is that at the very same time, Manning was holding clandestine, midnight meetings with parishioners to administer the rites of confession.  Not commonly done in the Church of England for decades by that time. Not strictly forbidden but _very_ unusual, very _Roman_."  
  
John didn't miss the tightening of Sherlock's jaw, the interested flickering of his eyelids.  
  
"Well, I discover a thing like that, and the obvious implication is that something sexual was happening at those little rendezvous." Strachey sighed dramatically. "Tragically, despite my best efforts I found nothing at all to support such a theory. Which is to say, yes, most of the relevant parishioners were female, there's nothing to say it _didn't_ happen, but if there were ever a breath of lovemaking to be salvaged from the wreckage of religiosity, I can tell you now that any evidence is long-gone." He looked genuinely distraught. John bit the inside of his mouth to keep from smiling.  
  
Sherlock cleared his throat. "And were you able to confirm the identities of any of these female penitents?"  
  
"Not all, by any means. They were mostly young servant girls, and a few village matrons. And one young woman of the middle class who became a sort of pet project for Manning. Wrote several times to a colleague about her dangerous fascination with Catholicism; Manning seemed to think his own transgressions stopped short of a certain point, you see."  
  
Sherlock did see. Even John saw: any leverage Manning may have exerted over Miss Whitmore in his role as her confessor could explain Mrs. Shuttleworth's reference to an "abuse of authority." Whether that leverage had been spiritual or sexual, or something else entirely — a pregnancy could explain the woman's flight from the village, as could some sort of decisive religious crisis.  
  
"Did you run across any records," asked Sherlock, "regarding a Mrs. Caldonia Shuttleworth?"  
  
Strachey groaned. "How could I not. The woman was such a meddling shrew I felt oppressed by her sanctimony my _self_ before my research was over."  
  
"No love lost between her and Manning, then."  
  
"No indeed. He nearly lost the promotion to Archdeacon because of her. She ran around the parish calling him 'tainted,' harping on about a woman who disappeared from the town, a Miss — Whitbread? Whitechapel?"  
  
"Whitmore?" asked John, and Strachey nodded.  
  
"That was it, Whitmore. But refusing to go into any detail. Wrote vague, bilious letters about Manning's Romish leanings to anyone she could think of. She was just the kind of big fish who expected the run of her particular small pond." Strachey shuddered.  
  
"So you have no idea," Sherlock said, "what connection Mrs. Shuttleworth was claiming between Manning and Whitmore?"  
  
Strachey waved the question away. "She never came out with anything very specific, which knowing her type was undoubtedly because she didn't have anything. Claimed to be a bosom friend of the vanished girl, but I doubt the harpy even knew poor benighted Miss — Whitmore, or whatever her name was.  Painting herself as an aggrieved benefactor was probably just a ploy to make herself look...more…"  
  
Strachey's monologue trailed off as his eyes flickered to the kitchen door, through which a large blond youth had just sauntered, eating an apple. He leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb with studied insouciance.  
  
"...more important," Strachey finished, licking his lips.  
  
"Besides," he added, adjusting his spectacles and glancing back at Sherlock, "she was such a self-righteous Low Church woman, adultery and Popery probably went hand-in-hand in her mind. She'd hardly need to accuse the man of one, once she'd mentioned the other."  
  
"What saved Manning's appointment?" This from John, who had been taking notes throughout the conversation.  
  
"Oddly enough, it was a Low Church man from the area who came to his defense. A fellow by the name of Julius Hare, an Archdeacon himself from a neighboring diocese. Didn't even know Manning very well, so his motives weren't questioned. And Manning got the job, after all, much to harpy Shuttleworth's disgruntlement."    
  
There was a general titter around the room at the expense of Mrs. Shuttleworth. When no additional questions were forthcoming, the blond new arrival pushed himself off the doorjamb with the heel of his foot, extending his hand to John.  
  
"I hear you served in France," he said. "Major Ralph Partridge, Fifth Battalion Gloucester Regiment."  
  
John returned the handshake. "Captain John Watson. RAMC, served with the Northumberland Fusiliers."  
  
Partridge smiled, aggressively jocular. "It's good to have another military man at Gordon Square, in amongst all these bloody COs. Duncan and David actually rode out the war hidden amongst the bougainvillea down in Charleston. Can you believe it? Frolicking in the nude, no doubt, and daubing away at their paintings while the bombs dropped over the Channel."  
  
Strachey fidgeted awkwardly in his seat, but a dark-haired man across the room — Duncan or David, presumably — raised his wine glass in a mock toast. "Hear, hear. Preferable to dying for an unjust cause, I'd say."  
  
Partridge scoffed, brandished his apple. "It's just that _I_ for one can't imagine mucking about with paints and pederasty while one's friends and brothers die, is all." He clapped a hand on John's shoulder; Sherlock's eyebrows rose and Strachey looked vaguely ill.  
  
John gave a tight smile. "Ah. Well, I was patching lads up, mostly. When I could." He cleared his throat, tugged a bit at his collar.  
  
Partridge blustered on. "Yes, excellent," he said. "You and me can stick together." He lowered his voice confidentially. "These artist types, eh? Always something womanish about 'em."  
  
John felt his tongue scrape against his dry palate.  
  
 _A stretcher, fumbled on a detonation. A downward glance. A boot-heel pressing a sketchbook into the Picardy mud. Stuttering rifle fire and breath halting in his lungs —_  
  
"I —" he said, and cleared his throat again in the suddenly airless room. "I knew some — some artist types. Over there." He cursed himself for not shutting up; the words were slithering through the cracks of his defenses.  
  
Ralph looked nonplussed. "Did you? They couldn't dodge fast enough, eh?"  
  
 _Daniel's horse-panicked eyes. Retracing his steps in the dirty dawn. Mucking about frantic, the book beneath a pile of blood- and mud-soaked cloth._  
  
Something snapped. "Yes, I damn well did," said John, his voice rising erratically. "And you should know he never tried to dodge anything in his life. He gave everything to that war, to his — his country."  
  
John was breathing raggedly, an edge of hysteria creeping up his throat, and he tried to swallow it down. He was suddenly aware that other conversations around the room had died down. Most eyes were fixed on him and on Partridge.  
  
"I goddamn wish he _would_ have hidden out drawing bougainvillea, or making love, or — or  whatever asinine thing, instead of offering himself up to the bloody slaughter. Got to the front lines full of noble intentions to — I don't know — bear witness, or —"  
  
 _Sketches of thyme and violets. Sketches of gun turrets, various positions. Sketches of soldiers lounging on tanks, helmets unfastened. Sketches of John, smiling in his shirtsleeves by lantern-light. Sketches of hips ending in stumps, shoulders stripped to the bone._  
  
"— or, take part in the triumph of truth and beauty over the uncivilised horde. I suppose you discovered that overwhelming triumph of civilisation, did you? I'm afraid what I saw was masses of young men mangled or murdered or —"  
  
 _Sketches of a village woman, howling into the night. Sketches of John, dead on his cot in the field hospital, skin rotting off his frame. Sketches of Venice, gondoliers with faces blown half-off, skulls exposed. Sketches of an older couple with Daniel's features, gasping in the mud, drowning in air._  
  
"— or — damaged. Badly damaged."  
  
By now even Keynes had stopped swaying on his stool, and was gazing entranced at the exchange. Partridge looked flummoxed; this was not the conversation he had begun.  
  
"But, I mean to say," Partridge began. "You can't _seriously_ be suggesting —"  
  
"Ralph," said Strachey, almost tenderly, and Partridge huffed himself into silence. The silence yawned and breathed in the room.  
  
"I'm sorry," said John at last, rolling his shoulders, anger seeping away. "I didn't mean to — Look, nothing's as simple as a single story, is all. We'll just be —"  
  
"Who was he?" asked a soft voice from in front of the fire. Strachey was gazing at John as if seeing him for the first time, his voice uncharacteristically void of irony.  
  
John just looked at him for a moment. "Bloke I knew," he said at last, with a deep exhale. "A private. Daniel MacIntyre. We were — close."  
   
"What happened to him?" asked Strachey, almost a whisper.  
  
"Well. He was institutionalised." John sighed, suddenly exhausted. "Couldn't recognise anyone, any of us, so. Thought I'd been killed, thought all his family were killed. Kept going on about Renaissance sculpture. I believe he's still there."  
  
Dreadful, dreadful silence.  
  
"Look, I really do apologise for — for forcing this into your midst like this. It's completely inappropriate, I'm sorry. War is — maybe it's necessary, I don't know. It's not simple." He looked over at Sherlock, desperate for a cue to leave, and Sherlock shook himself out of a kind of trance, and rose, and made their excuses.

 

***

 

Relieved as he was to be opening the door onto Gordon Square at last, John didn't register the two pairs of feet approaching until there were voices to accompany them. "Mr. Holmes! Dr. Watson!" the voices called, and Sherlock and John turned on the pavement to see Strachey and a remarkably mobile Keynes panting as they tumbled out of the front door.  
  
"Dr. Watson," Strachey repeated, still out of breath, adjusting his spectacles and then wringing his hands. "Mr. Holmes. I feel responsible for — I wanted to apologise for Ralph. He can be — well —"  
  
"— an insufferable _bastard_ ," supplied Keynes, hiccuping slightly.  
  
Sherlock turned away to hide his grudging smile. Strachey pursed his lips but didn't argue the point. "And, well, Dr. Watson, we didn't realise —" he paused. "We do our best to help out — family," he finished, and Sherlock started forward.  
  
"Mr. Strachey," he said, "You have the wrong —" but John laid a hand on his arm.  
  
"Holmes."    
  
Sherlock lapsed into silence, taken aback, looking down at his sleeve where John had touched it. Both Bloomsbury men were regarding the pair with obvious curiosity. Strachey cleared his throat.  
  
"Ah. Maynard reminds me that Cambridge term is ended and I had planned to make the trip to Charleston in any case sometime in the next few days. It's only forty miles or so from the town where Manning lived and worked during the period you're investigating —" this with a nod to Sherlock, "and I could, well, show you the relevant sites, take you around his church and the village…" he trailed off. "If you think that might be useful," he added lamely, adjusting his spectacles.  
  
"Er," said Sherlock, tearing his gaze from John and looking back at the other two men with eyebrows slightly raised. "Yes, that, er" he said. "I think that would be helpful. We would want to visit the area anyway; an expert could only speed things along." It was a passable imitation of honesty; John doubted anyone else would catch the reluctance in Sherlock's tone at the idea of accepting help, or the subtly forced quality about his smile.  
  
Strachey smiled. "Excellent," he said, and held out his hand to both of them in turn. "I'll be leaving tomorrow morning, but shall we meet at the Midhurst station in the early evening?"  
  
Sherlock nodded. "I'll send a telegram with the time to expect us."  
  
And then the two pairs of men parted at last, and Sherlock was able to hail a cab. John expected, the whole ride home, to be castigated for his uncharacteristic personal disclosures in the kitchen, but nothing of the sort happened. Apart from the few times John caught Sherlock's grey eyes settling on him through the gloom of the cab's interior, the two men remained lost in their own thoughts until they pulled up outside Baker Street, and made their separate ways to bed. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Fair warning that poor drunken Sebastian in this chapter is not Sebastian Moran of Holmesian fame. He's my version of Sebastian Sprott, who was a real person and lover of John Maynard Keynes around this time. My apologies for any name-related confusion, but that's what you get when you leave the Bookworld™. Maynard Keynes, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, David Garnett, Julius Hare, Lady Jane Strachey, Pippa Strachey, Ralph Partridge and John Henry Newman were real people, though may here do fictional things. Caldonia Shuttleworth is inspired by a real person but is mostly fictional. Everyone else in this chapter is fictional.
> 
> 2\. The clock-resetting gag is something that Keynes pulled, in 1909, at Vanessa's Charleston farmhouse, and it really did create chaos in the household.
> 
> 3\. The "more desperately moral even than clergymen" line is from a Strachey letter to Clive Bell from August 1907. I'm not witty enough to write Bloomsbury without a little help from Strachey.
> 
> 4\. For an idea of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell's style of interior mural-painting, see [this](http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/grant-bathing-n04567) mural by Grant, and [this](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rZSCipZ48Vo/Tn9FgeTQL-I/AAAAAAAAAqE/xCllp9hbmQw/s1600/bell-Bathers-screen.jpg) screen by Bell.
> 
> 5\. The amount of primary-source research I'm having Lytton Strachey do here is totally ahistorical. He actually did very little with primary sources and didn't really even care if his secondary sources were correct. But hey, poetic license: if it was good enough for Strachey, it's good enough for me. Strachey's account of 1840-41 in the life of Manning is told much more hilariously and only slightly more long-windedly in the first section of Eminent Victorians; I made slight changes to suit this story.
> 
> 6\. Certain battalions of the Northumberland Fusiliers, which the BBC Sherlock folks identify as John Watson's regiment, were indeed at both Battles of the Somme (1916 and 1918).
> 
> 7\. I owe Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway for a loose suggestion of the back-story between John and Daniel (inspired by Septimus's relationship with his commanding ofﬁcer). Woolf was probably in Richmond recovering from a breakdown at the time this story takes place, but who knows? Maybe she was in the kitchen listening to John.


	3. Other testimony of summer nights

***

150 11.0 SE LON 316P JUNE 17 1920  
SHERLOCK HOLMES, 221B BAKER STREET, LONDON ENGLAND  
  
MEET AT SIMPSONS USUAL TEA TIME STOP MAY HAVE INFORMATION REGARDING CHARLOTTE WHITMORE STOP MYCROFT

 

***

 

A person did not live long with Sherlock Holmes without developing a sense for the rhythm of his moods. Manic euphoria; teasing hilarity; drone of unbearable tedium. And so, after a morning and early afternoon spent watching thunderheads roil and mass, John was unsurprised when the storm finally broke directly over his head. Sherlock looked up from his pile of letters, stamped and addressed for the post, and leveled cloud-grey eyes on his target, who was attempting to project innocence by hiding behind the _Illustrated London News_.  "If I recall correctly," Sherlock began, "you didn't even believe this Cardinal Manning connection to be investigable."  
  
"That's true," said John, not looking up from his paper. "Though I'll admit that if anyone could follow a trail that's been cold for eighty years, it'd be you."  
  
"And yet I can't make out," continued Sherlock, "why you would deliberately allow Mssrs. Strachey and Keynes to believe a lie about you and your army service just to secure Strachey's, for lack of a better term, help, on our upcoming trip to Sussex. A lie —"  
  
"Oh, come on, the man's an expert on the subject of your investigation. I think even you can grant he may actually be helpful."  
  
"— A lie, what's more," continued Sherlock, talking over him, "that makes you out a criminal in the eyes of the law, and which, from every inflection and behaviour you have ever displayed in my presence, is utterly contrary to your nature."  
  
"Ah."  No further comment from behind the newspaper.  
  
"Yes. Ah. Is this all down to your selfless desire to pursue justice for the shade of Miss Charlotte Whitmore?  Or for the present Miss Summerson?  I assure you, we will unearth the truth about this business without you sacrificing yourself on the altar of public opinion."  
  
"Two tipsy Bloomsbury bohemians do not 'public opinion' make, Holmes."    
  
The lack of response to this comment became so excruciatingly pointed that John sighed and nodded, then snapped the paper to and laid it on the side-table, getting to his feet.  "All right," he said, low but determined. "Here it is. They weren't wrong, Holmes. Everything they assumed about Daniel and me. It's true."    
  
Silence blossomed in the room. It knocked up against the ticking mantel clock, suddenly deafening.  
  
Sherlock stared blankly for a count of seconds.  John squared his back, tipped his chin up. "Will this be a problem, then?  Are you going to report me to Lestrade? Get in touch with the pension board?"  
  
Sherlock startled. "Christ, Watson, no. Why would you think such a thing?" His gaze was still oddly blank.  
  
"Well," said John, nodding. "All right then." He was finding it difficult to back down from the confrontation he had assumed was coming. Was craving, despite himself, more of a reaction to his revelation.  
  
"You're in earnest," Sherlock said.  John nodded again, once.    
  
"But how," Sherlock said, and paused, fumbled in his jacket pocket for a cigarette. "I mean to say," he continued, "we've shared this flat for a _year_.  How could I — how could _I_ have overlooked this, after all that time?  Your body language, your breathing.  Nothing, none of your usual tells, there was never any indication —"  An unaccustomed look of self-doubt crossed Sherlock's face, as if it had wandered in from a neighboring conversation and accidentally become stuck there.  
  
John exhaled, relief battling exasperation across his features.  "Should have known your reaction would be to castigate yourself about clues overlooked, rather than being fussed about anything I get up to."  He shook his head.  "Don't be disappointed in yourself. We didn't all spend the war closeted in rural farmhouses with artist lovers. A man learns to be circumspect in the Forces, not give anything away."  
  
Sherlock snorted. "I'd like to think I can hold myself to a _slightly_ higher standard than some John Bull brigadier general."  
  
"That's not it, Holmes, honestly, there was nothing for you to observe." He groaned at Sherlock's incredulous expression. Almost nothing, he amended mentally. And then, aloud: "Look. You remember the Finmore case? The one where the husband had jerry-rigged the new electrical circuits in the bedroom so that his wife's murder would look like the result of incompetent wiring?"  
  
A wary nod from behind the desk.  
  
"That's how I think of it, like there's a — a network of circuits in my brain, routing current. I learned to disconnect certain wires, just break the circuit for a time when I knew it would be too dangerous." Sherlock was showing mild astonishment; John rubbed his hands over his face, gathered his thoughts.  
  
"I once took part in a training exercise, on how to resist enemy interrogation. A good joke, as it turned out, given the ratio of carnage to capture on the front. And given how much so-called 'intelligence' any of us had ever even seen. But I hadn't been to the trenches yet, I didn't know what I was walking into. The commanding officer had this idea about cover, about lying convincingly in crises. I remember he said, it's not a lie in the usual way. 'Cover is what you believe,' he said. 'Cover is who you are.'  
  
"So I just — cut the wires connecting me up, and convinced myself that the parts not...electrified...didn't exist. And then, after I was wounded, and in the midst of all that other wreckage — it was force of habit, I suppose.  The wires," he swallowed, "the wires just stayed cut off." And again he didn't add, until lately.    
  
"The women you —" Sherlock paused.  
  
"I went with women as well," John said, shrugging. "But I've hardly gone with anyone since my injury, it just hasn't seemed…" he coughed, uncomfortably aware of the tapping and fluttering of Sherlock's hands, the cording of his throat as he drew on his cigarette. John shuffled his feet.  
  
Sherlock, however, seemed to be pursuing his own train of thought.  "And then yesterday," he mused, almost to himself, "when two men you'd known a few hours, one of them falling down drunk, succeeded in making this deduction that had somehow eluded _me_ , you decided immediately that you could confide in them."  He looked up at John, gaze inquisitive through his lashes and cigarette smoke.  
  
"Oh god, Holmes, it wasn't like that. Of course I don't distrust you. It was just — easier, all around.  Yesterday, they came right out with it, didn't they? I wouldn't lie outright to them, and I wouldn't have to you either." He wondered in passing if this were true. "And look, you're not exactly an open book yourself, you know. I've seen you mimic men — _and_ women — of every conceivable class and predilection flawlessly, cab drivers and tarts and spoiled young nancys, I don't know what all — what _ought_ I to have assumed about you? Why the hell ought I to have assumed you'd have any interest one way or the other?" Bitterness was seeping into his tone.  
  
Sometime during this speech Sherlock had vaulted from his chair as if stung, and was now making jabbing gestures toward the other man with his cigarette.  "Don't be an _idiot_ , Watson. I'm interested in anything pertaining to human behaviour and psychology. I'm not sure if you _noticed_ ," he bit out, advancing, "but I make rather a study of those subjects."  They were standing so close now that John could hear Sherlock's elevated breathing, was enveloped by the cloud of his tobacco smoke. Their eyes were locked one to the other, joined by an invisible cord that thrummed and thrummed.  
  
"Not exactly what I —"  
  
Both men jumped at the sound of the bell, and broke eye contact. John shuffled back a bit as a telegram boy burst into the flat, holding out a thin brown envelope.  When a few seconds elapsed in tense silence, the boy looked curiously between his potential customers, still with hand and envelope extended.  Sherlock snatched the telegram, ripping it open and scanning the contents. John handed the boy a coin.  
  
"Mycroft," muttered Sherlock, and glanced at the clock on the mantel with a sour expression, exhaling hard, hand running distractedly through his curls. "Look, I have to go meet my brother for tea. Possible information on this whole Summerson-Manning case."  He was already shrugging into a jacket, taking his homburg from the rack.  
  
John nodded, backing up, breathing deeply. "Yes, fine. Fine."  
  
"I'll see you at the station, at five? And listen," he added, turning back and grasping John's shoulder lightly, eyes seeking out eyes, "you know you have nothing to worry about, don't you. It's all just...just transport to me. No importance at all." And with a tight smile Sherlock was out the door and pounding down the stairs to Baker Street.    
  
He didn't turn around on his way out the door, and so failed to observe his flatmate reaching back up to the shoulder Sherlock had touched, as if John could still feel the traces of a pale, long-fingered hand.  Mrs. Hudson, bustling in a few minutes later with a bag of vegetables, was so startled by her lodger's decimated expression that she asked John in an alarmed tone what the matter might be, but "Nothing, Mrs. Hudson," John replied, shaking himself. "Nothing at all of importance."

 

***

 

Sherlock arrived at Simpson's with his head still uncomfortably full of the scene with John.  It galled him to realise that he had missed such a large and presumably formative aspect of his friend's makeup — predictable, steady John, whom Sherlock had imagined so easily and accurately read. John's frank cornflower eyes, John's sandy head, and the way he rolled his shoulders when they ached, had all been a comfort; now the thought of those things seemed vaguely contaminated. Beyond the wound to Sherlock's professional pride was the knowledge that, whatever John said, he had obviously chosen to keep this piece of himself from Sherlock.  To keep it from Sherlock in particular, when he would, apparently, admit to it without hesitation in the presence of certain others.    
  
The thought rankled.  Was Sherlock, after all, so much less trustworthy than a pair of bohemian gossips? Had he not demonstrated his liberal morality and willingness to bend the law in any number of cases John had written up? Sherlock had renounced the life of the body years ago in favor of the life of the mind; yet surely John realised that, had things gone differently, had Sherlock been less — had there been _anybody_ with whom —  
  
Well.  Sherlock knew he ought to be impressed that John was able to suppress this aspect of himself successfully enough to mislead him, but he managed instead only consternation and, yes, some offense that John would do so.  
  
Sherlock's aggravation found a new outlet as he folded his long legs under the table across from his brother. Mycroft Holmes's sedentary, supra-governmental omniscience, convenient as it sometimes proved, had grated on the younger Holmes for years, and right now the smirk that accompanied those qualities was firmly in place.  
  
"And how," snapped out Sherlock without preliminaries, "did you know about Charlotte Whitmore?"  
  
Mycroft's smile widened.  "We've eyes and ears, dear brother.  I could tell you, indeed, that you needn't concern yourself with the fate of Miss Caldonia Summerson, that police involvement is immanent and probably, in this case, even adequate —"  
  
"I'd worked out that much, thank you. Though I wouldn't overestimate the Yard."  
  
"— but, of course, you prefer to come to these things on your own time.  As we both know."    
  
Grimaces all around the table; Mycroft poured out tea. The dark wood and green leather of Simpsons' interior wrapped around the elder Holmes brother like an inanimate guard of honour, a show of support by the very armchairs and tea-strainers of the British institution. Sherlock sipped and glowered. "However," Mycroft continued, "this little case of yours may just turn out convenient. You could take care of some... _legwork_ ," he shuddered at the word, "that my people have been meaning to see to in the villages of Midhurst and West Lavington."  
  
A raised eyebrow. Silence. Mycroft sighed.  
  
"The records for the period around 1840," he began, "are, frankly, a disaster. As far as I know, my own position had no counterpart at the time, though I must admit that if it had, no traces would be left. Officially very little was preserved, if indeed anything was being investigated in the first place.  It was a chaotic period; riots on the bread lines and people clamoring for reform. Chartism, rotten boroughs...public opinion was for prosecuting the Lords, not the lawbreakers. The Met was a bumbling ten-year babe in arms, the SIS not even a gleam in C's eye, and when one ventures as far into the hinterlands as West Lavington...well, you can imagine the difficulties."  
  
Sherlock rolled his eyes, the brothers briefly allied against the incompetence of the larger world.  
  
"Still," continued Mycroft, "I have reason to believe that there were agents operating in the area around the time of Manning's appointment as Archdeacon. 1839 and 1841 were both years of potato blight in Ireland, and whenever tenants were evicted, certain...subversive elements held British policymakers responsible."  A snort interrupted him, and Mycroft looked across at his brother with an elaborate show of deference.  
  
"About which they were absolutely correct," Sherlock said.  "You know I don't play _politics_ , Mycroft."  
  
Mycroft waved this away impatiently.  "I am not asking you to pursue convictions, obviously, as all concerned parties are long since dead.  You would simply be tying up a few loose ends for us. Ascertaining the mechanics of an operation whose existence we suspect but have never bothered to investigate properly. You can appreciate that in the current climate, His Majesty desires no stone left unturned relating to the Irish problem. In exchange…" he shifted a manila folder on the table to reveal a small pile of letters, paper yellowed and covered with a spiky blue scrawl. As the letter-writer had cross-written them to conserve space, vertical lines of script cross-hatched over the horizontal, Sherlock could decipher little from across the table.  
  
"These letters," said Mycroft, toying with the bundle, "were found in the possession of Mr. Cian Lear, who holds the distinction of being one of the few known Irish subversives to die a natural death in his own bed, at the age of eighty-five. I had just joined His Majesty's government when Mr. Lear died, but these...attracted my attention."  
  
Sherlock picked up the letters, unfolding them gingerly one by one and glancing down their lengths, from addresses to signatures. "Standard-grade rag paper," he observed, "pre-dating the introduction of wood-pulp stationery, but not by much, say 1830 to 1845. Cross-written, narrow margins, by a young, right-handed man."  
  
"Cian Lear himself, as a matter of fact," agreed Mycroft. "They have been matched to his hand."  
  
"But you think they were composed by Charlotte Whitmore."  
  
"Either that, or Lear wrote them intending to pass them off as Miss Whitmore's. As you can see, they are signed with the initials 'CW,' and there is just enough detail to set them in the adjacent towns of Midhurst and West Lavington during the period of her residence there — a period when Lear's other extant correspondence is postmarked from the same area. Meaning he was likely there at least some of the time. What's more, the last letter is dated just a few days before her disappearance.  Yes, dear brother," he smiled at Sherlock's sharp look, "I remember _grand-mère_ 's scrapbooks, as well."  
  
Sherlock looked back down at the letters in his hands. "They appear to be love letters. Somewhat —" he turned a page, quirked an eyebrow, "— _explicit_ love letters. Lear could have been conspiring to ruin Whitmore's reputation...but to be convincing, she would have had to copy these out in her own hand. Conversely, if it was Lear who copied them out, leaving the originals…"  
  
Mycroft shrugged. "There may be nothing more to it than a desire to safeguard his lover's identity. Though why, in that case, he would have copied out her initials is a mystery. In the absence of further data...perhaps Lear was a jealous lover who wanted proof of her betrayal, or a blackmailer who needed to prove his leverage over his victim."  
  
Sherlock regarded the papers in his hands. "Lear isn't a Scottish name," he said.  
  
"Ah yes, the salutation. 'Dearest Scot,' 'My beloved Scot,' and so on. No, Lear was Irish through and through. It's possible that Whitmore had taken up with another Scotsman in the village, or someone with the given name of Scot."  
  
"Or it could be a trade name."  
  
"As you say."  
  
Sherlock continued to pore over the letters. Mycroft cleared his throat. "I admit we haven't had the spare resources to look into this connection between Lear and Miss Whitmore. As it seems you will be traveling to West Lavington in any case…"  
  
"Yes," grunted Sherlock, "apparently our priorities align in this case."  
  
He mouthed at his tea, and tried to avoid the sight of his brother looking like a dog breeder whose terrier had just won Best in Show. His gaze fell instead on the next table over, where a white-clad waiter was applying his carving knife, with restrained gusto, to an enormous slab of beef. Sherlock shuddered; dreadfully early in the day for such displays. "I suppose," he admitted, "that running around on your business will hardly be any less unpleasant than pulling information out of those Strachey and Keynes idiots."  
  
Fleeting surprise disturbed Mycroft's poker face for a moment. " _Maynard_ Keynes? I hadn't realised you were fraternising with economists."  
  
"More like lust-addled inebriates," grumbled Sherlock.  
  
Mycroft made a noncommittal hum, looking appraisingly at his brother. "There is nothing in one descriptor that necessarily precludes the other."  
  
Sherlock gave a dismissive gesture of the wrist. "Yes, yes, I've heard it all before, Mycroft."  
  
"You could stand to listen to it one of these days. But I wouldn't underestimate the man if I were you, Sherlock. I've been keeping an eye on him since the Paris talks."  
  
Sherlock, for the second time that day, found himself incredulous, dry laughter forcing its way out of his throat. "You met him at the _peace_ negotiations? Was he — was he coherent?"  
  
Mycroft grimaced, refusing the joke. "Extremely. Much to the discomfort of the Americans."  
  
"You take him seriously." A smile still played around the corners of Sherlock's mouth.  
  
"I do," agreed Mycroft. "Our politics do not align, but I very much regret to say that I believe many of his points to be prescient. Particularly about the dangers of such stringent reparations on Germany —" he broke off. "But of course, you don't _play_ politics." Sherlock raised his chin and his eyebrows, aggressive, and Mycroft pursed his lips.  
  
"Suffice to say," Mycroft said, "that by the end of the negotiations he and I were working toward much the same goals. I believe we might have succeeded, had not Mr. Wilson shown such stubborn intransigence at the end. Having never heard of my unexpected ally, I examined any and all documents outlining Mr. Keynes's allegiances and train of logic. While he holds certain sentimental notions about Love and Civilisation, I admit that his reasoning is flawless. There were one or two points which even I had not fully realised."  
  
The brothers considered one another across the dark wood tabletop and the bone china; Sherlock seemed, for once, at a loss for words.  
  
"Well," he said at last, clearing his throat and glancing at his watch, "well. While I can't say I'm eager to attempt replicating your results, that is an — er — intriguing story." He pushed himself to his feet, tucking the letters into his inner jacket pocket. "And now I must be off if I mean to catch my train. Mycroft," he said, turning and replacing his homburg on his head, "I'll be in touch."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes  
> 1\. The lines "Cover is what you believe. Cover is who you are" are stolen wholesale from John Le Carré's novel The Honourable Schoolboy. I like to think of John Watson being trained in counterintelligence by the likes of George Smiley, Senior.  
> 2\. Lots of political stuff, most of which you don't really need to know, but in case you're curious...  
>       a. **Chartism** was a working-class rights movement active during the economic depressions of the 1830s and 40s.  
>        b. **Rotten boroughs** : as the population centers across England shifted and the parliamentary lines weren't re-drawn, certain districts were left basically uninhabited, yet delegates were still appointed to the seats supposedly representing those districts. Usually those appointments were made through nepotism and/or bribery; understandably, people in actual population centers were upset about this, as it meant they were under- or un-represented in government, and that democracy was replaced by the good ol' boy network.  
>       c. There were earlier, less organized police forces in London, but the **Met** was founded in 1829. The British SIS (Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6) was established by Captain Smith-Cumming (code name C, which is also the reason Control uses this initial in Le Carré's books) in 1909. So recent! I find this crazy. What did countries do before they had secret services? Did they just use pirates?  
>        d. The relationship between British imperialism and **Irish potato famine** is pretty complicated, but a very simplified version: British policies kept Irish Roman Catholics (80% of the Irish population) from owning land, entering professions, obtaining education or doing basically anything else except subsistence farming for their British/Protestant landlords. The economic system was such that the Irish poor were living hand-to-mouth on a mono-crop of dirt-cheap potatoes while the fields were being used to raise cattle for export to Britain. In many instances, even when potato crops failed, resulting in starvation for the Irish poor, exports of beef and potatoes to England continued unabated. The blight problem got FAR WORSE just a few years later (1845-52, the Great Famine), but even before then there were plenty of lean years for the Irish peasants.  
>        e. In 1920, the British government and the Irish Republican Army were in the midst of the Irish War of Independence, hence Mycroft's increased interest in unearthing any dirt on Irish operatives, even historical ones.  
> 3\. John Maynard Keynes really was at the Paris Peace Talks in 1919. He was lobbying against the levying of harsh war reparations on Germany, arguing that doing so would bring about the economic collapse of that country and eventually lead to another world war...which, oh look, is exactly what happened.


	4. What are the roots that clutch

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thanks this week to all the awesome people who encouraged me to rewrite after I lost most of Chapters 8, 9 and 11 to unexpected hard drive death: storyqdayx5d, CharlieBravoWhiskey, Songstersmiscellany, Roane72, authenticsound, Emma de los Nardos, and anyone else I've unintentionally missed. You guys made all the difference, THANK YOU.

17 September 1840  
  
Dearest Scot,  
  
I can hardly credit what passed between us. Was that you? Truly you, so undismayed? You who have always clung to your irreproachableness? To your virtue like an icy cloak?  
  
Oh, I believed myself dreaming, your fingertips against my throat and my shoulders and I was certain they would cease if I so much as breathed. I thought I'd faint with yearning. Die, if you reconsidered. I scorned air. Needed only that feather-light concussion. Fingers, feverish and apt. Breath to nape, convulsive. Your mouth, love — incandescent. You shattered me so quietly, so quietly.  
  
I am as drunk on my own audacity in writing these words, as I am on yours in daring those. How you sighed, and called me beloved. Oh I am reeling with it, giddy with it, giddy with ruins and kisses and nights full of you, my fairest love. I long to drink you, devour you. Imprison you in a cage of my limbs, and kiss and bite your skin to blushing. Watch your spine arc. Your pushing hips, bowstringed. Bridging my bed. Nerves singing high and sharp, a voluptuous transubstantiation.  
  
Have I truly dared to kiss your hands and hair, and have I nestled my face in the hollows of your throat and breathed and breathed? I mustn't trust such bliss. But nor can I bring myself to release you, to return to that purgatory of silences and frustrations. When I see you again will you turn away, all cold refusal, and leave me to banal conversationalists? Or will you be brave, will you steal moments to press me down, to kiss, to murmur? I beg you, sweetheart. Enfold me, consume me, let me hold you. Please believe me  
  
yours utterly,  
CW

***

 

"These are remarkable."  
  
Sherlock, oddly distracted since John had joined him on the platform at Victoria Station, hummed noncommittally. He was staring with great perseverance out the window of the train car, away from John, but his bearing had none of the deep inward focus from the day before in the cab. Instead he thrummed with distraction: rapid blinking, spastic bouncing of knees and feet.  
  
"Fairly _shocking_ , yes, but remarkable," John continued. He waited a moment; no response. "Do you really think these are genuine? Genuinely written by Miss Whitmore, I mean? And in 1840? Seems incredible."  
  
Sherlock grunted, and did not shift his gaze from the window. "My brother believes they're genuine. And if you honestly insist on hearing me say it, then yes, I _trust his judgment_." The last three words were bitten off as if bitter on his tongue.  
  
"Well, in that case...what an exceptional woman."  
  
Sherlock whipped his head around at last, his gaze sharp. "Exceptional in what way?"  
  
John's eyes widened. "I...would think it was obvious." Silence from Sherlock, so he pressed on. "How many ladies in the early days of Victoria would — hell, how many _could_ write love letters like this? I couldn't do it myself. She must have spent time in Holywell Street, or, I don't know, I can't explain it. Surely she wasn't French?"  
  
Sherlock seemed to be turning these comments over in his mind. "How many _could_ write such letters," he murmured. "How many, indeed. Miss Whitmore's...competence...is intriguing."  
  
John was nonplussed. "I...suppose," he agreed. "Lucky fellow, though. Can you imagine receiving a thing like this in eighteen- _forty_? From an educated woman? They're very — detailed, aren't they? I can barely read them now without blushing."  
  
Sherlock catalogued in a moment: dilated pupils, fluttering pulse at the throat, tongue licking out over dry lips. Stubbornly crossed legs. And yes, a flush up his neck. Blushing, indeed, John.  
  
"You find these letters...appealing? Arousing? You think they are, let's say, the outcries of a smitten heart?"  
  
"You don't?" John spluttered at Sherlock's dismissive tone.  
  
Sherlock shifted in his seat, averted his eyes. "I..."  
  
"Really? I suppose they're a bit sentimental, flowery — I would expect worse given the date, to be honest — but honestly, Holmes, you don't read these and imagine someone writing things like this to you? Wanting you like this? Or even just the mechanics, though she seems a bit fixated on using her _teeth_ in a few of —"  
  
"Oh, for God's sake."  
  
Briefly offended, John followed Sherlock's glower to the true cause of the interruption: not, he was relieved to discover, his own susceptibility to lewd Victoriana. The train was pulling into the Midhurst platform, and waiting on the small outcropping of pavement was not only Lytton Strachey, but also —  
  
"That _idiot_ Keynes," Sherlock groaned. "I had no idea he would be here as well." John waved cheerily from the window to disguise Sherlock's grimace. They were in for it now, after all; Strachey and Keynes were two of a very meager assemblage waiting to meet passengers, and one can't lose oneself in a non-existent crowd.

  


***

  
"Good evening!" Keynes called, bustling forward to help with their bags and launching immediately into speech, shaking hands with the newcomers and making way for Strachey to do the same. "I _do_ apologise for my behaviour the other night, I can't imagine what a frightful impression I must have made. I don't normally drink that much, you must believe me. But what with end-of-term high spirits and then that unexpectedly awful row with Sebastian, I'm afraid things got out of hand. Vanessa assures me I thoroughly embarrassed myself."  
  
John made a conciliatory gesture implying the all-forgiving brotherhood of those who have behaved badly while inebriated; Sherlock drew himself up and looked forbidding. Neither had the chance to speak, as Keynes ploughed on.  
  
"So, when Lytton said he was coming down here, and me planning to spend much of the summer at Charleston just down the road, this seemed an appropriate way to make amends. Please, I am at your service for the next few days. Mr. Holmes, where would you like to begin?"  
  
In the face of such concerted efforts at accommodation, even Sherlock's surliness struggled to sustain itself. The June daylight would linger another few hours, so it was decided to drop their baggage at the inn and pay a visit to the church of St. Mary Magdalene, where, Strachey said, Miss Whitmore had likely met Manning for secret midnight confessions.

  
The villages of Midhurst and West Lavington had largely merged over the last eighty years, and the walk from the small Midhurst inn to the West Lavington church took five minutes at most. Strachey kept up a running commentary while Keynes, still doing his utmost to revive Sherlock's and John's poor opinion of him, rushed ahead opening stiles and entry doors for the other three.  
  
"The church is practically over the border into Midhurst," Strachey was saying, as Keynes held open the churchyard gate. "The site created some tension between the villages, but Butterfield — the architect, you may have heard of him if Victorian Gothic Revival is your cup of tea? No? Well thank God for that — anyway, Butterfield was set on building on this little rise. One must admit the man had an eye. The hill doesn't look like much, but — he wanted the place to have — presence, and —"  
  
The little hill was steep, and Strachey was gasping with the exertion. The foursome stopped and looked up at the church, silhouetted against the clouds at the end of a path winding upward through grave markers. The stone of the markers matched that of the façade, all gilded with late- afternoon light. For such a small building, the church was remarkably imposing.  
  
Sherlock slipped his cigarette case from his jacket pocket. He took out a cigarette, tapped it on the case, and lit it, looking up at the church and then around at the graves.  
  
"Would you mind terribly?" asked Strachey, smiling and gesturing at the cigarette, and although Sherlock raised an eyebrow at the other man's shortness of breath, he extended the case. Strachey took three; lit one. Sherlock offered the case to John, who refused; he then snapped it shut in Keynes's general direction.  
  
"It was built for Manning specifically," said Strachey, getting his breath back and resuming the climb. "Built to order for him and his — ah — _high church sensibilities_. They barely finished it before the man defected to Rome and they had to kick him out, but at the time — well, actually, at the time you're talking about, it would still have been under construction."  
  
"Ah?" said Sherlock. "And do you have any notion how far along?"  
  
"A year or so away from being finished, I would guess. Mainly interior work and embellishment remaining, and I believe they were already holding services here starting about 1839."  
  
They had reached the east-facing portal and Keynes darted forward, holding open the door. Sherlock turned pointedly away from him and addressed Strachey. "The Henfield residence,” Sherlock said, “that's Miss Whitmore's aunt and uncle — was on Grange Road. Do you know which direction that is from here?"  
  
Strachey shook his head, but Keynes, delighted, extracted a map from his inside jacket pocket and unfolded it, poking his finger at the lane in question. Sherlock nodded curtly, then began wandering around the church's periphery. He passed the small side-door on the north side, and hummed as he reached the western side of the hill, looking down at the village below.  
  
"That's Midhurst, is it?" he asked, and Strachey nodded. "So Midhurst people — Caldonia Shuttleworth and her husband, for example — walking up the hill would be more likely to use this door, whereas those from West Lavington would be more likely to use the front."  
  
He edged around the south side of the church, where the ground dropped dramatically in a steep slope. The church builders had needed to build up this side of the foundation, and the additional mortared stone was still exposed almost to head height, where the true foundation began. There was no approach from this side, and Sherlock had to cling to the side of the building as he inched his way along, running his fingers into the edges of the stones.  
  
"What could it possibly matter," murmured Strachey to John, as Sherlock pressed himself farther along, "from which direction harpy Shuttleworth arrived at church? Of all the possible questions."  
  
John shrugged, but Keynes looked interested. "He's messing about with facts,” Keynes murmured. “Seeing what they must mean." John smiled. “Torturing them into submission, yes.”  
  
Finally, Sherlock retraced his steps back around to the front portal and allowed Keynes to open it for them. The church interior was a Gothic cathedral in quaint, Anglicised miniature: an aisled nave with pointed vaults and slender columns topped with carved marble capitals, lit throughout by the afternoon sun as it filtered through the tracery of the west windows.  
  
John followed Sherlock into the dappled light, and thought of the few other times he had accompanied his friend into a church on some case or other. It was always an odd juxtaposition. Even Sherlock's movements seemed incongruous: graceful, but with the grace of indolence or utilitarianism rather than — well, rather than whatever John imagined the godfearing to have working on their side. Something decidedly less sensual, he guessed, thinking of his churchgoing mother and aunts. Lost in thought, he almost missed Sherlock speaking to him.  
  
"Try to imagine, Watson," he was saying, striding down the aisle and spreading his arms to indicate its width, "You're in Miss Whitmore's place. You're seeking out this priest with possible Papist sympathies for midnight conferences, and you're also writing scandalous letters to your lover. What are you looking for? What are you really _using_ these late-night meetings _for_?"  
  
John had jogged to catch up and was following at Sherlock's elbow as he glided slowly along the aisle, running hands along stones and backs of pews, cataloguing detail. This kind of speech was mostly rhetorical, but John was swept up, buzzing with the pursuit, and answered anyway.  
  
"Er. You think she was using Manning as a cover for meetings with her lover?" he asked.  
  
Sherlock made a dubious face. "It's always possible," he said, “but I think not. The meetings with Manning were supposedly already secret; adding an additional rendezvous would only make her absences twice as long and easier to spot. On the other hand, partaking in an antiquated ritual would not reflect nearly as badly on Miss Whitmore as engaging so, shall we say, _enthusiastically_ , in an illicit affair."  
  
"So she wanted a first line of defense, in case she was questioned."  
  
Sherlock paused to smirk at him. "Your army briefing session again, then?" John raised his eyebrows, glancing toward Strachey and Keynes, then looked back at Sherlock expectantly.  
  
"Yes," Sherlock continued, clearing his throat, "multiple lines of defense against questioning. And I believe she wanted —" he was climbing up on the pews now, examining the pillars, "— an excuse to deposit something here. Dropping something off wouldn't take any extra time, and —"  
  
"The letters?" asked John. "Her correspondent picked them up here? That's a bold move, leaving them accessible to any churchgoer who wandered in." He thought for a moment. "She'd want somewhere out of the way, but..."  
  
Sherlock turned to look down at him from the pew up which he'd clambered. "Yes?" he pressed. "What else would she want?"  
  
Strachey and Keynes were strolling up as John continued. "Someplace out of the mass of traffic, but not too conspicuous when her contact went to retrieve the thing."  
  
Sherlock jumped down, clapped a hand on his shoulder. "Excellent, Watson. Only half an hour behind my own train of thought." He turned to face the wall, and John grimaced at Strachey, whose lips pursed in sympathy. "This," said Sherlock, "is the only outer wall with no portal. So, no cross-traffic to the main flow from the doors to the east and west. The congregation would still be large enough, though, that a full Sunday service would fill all the pews." He turned abruptly toward Strachey. "Correct?"  
  
"I expect so," said Strachey. "Especially that year, with the church still so new."  
  
"Exactly," said Sherlock, as if he had been the one to make this point. "The letters are dated on Wednesdays and Thursdays. No doubt Miss Whitmore's weekly bout of penitence came on Thursdays, and the recipient, this 'Scot,' retrieved them the following Sunday during the service. Odds are highest that the hiding place is somewhere along this aisle, as it would be the easiest to access covertly, and — Watson?"  
  
This last because John was kneeling down, ginger but confident. Then he was shuffling on his knees from row to row, looking along the stone floor and feeling far back and up, under the pews. "I'm not much on religion," he was saying, "but with a dad and a grandad doctors, I have been to more than my fair share of church weddings and funerals." He paused, smiled up at Sherlock. "And you probably never even had to sit through boarding school chapel, did you?"  
  
"Private tutors," mumbled Sherlock, craning his neck to see what John was doing. John shook his head, grinning. Keynes, who seemed to have cottoned on, hurried to the other side of the aisle and began inspecting the legs and undersides of the pews as well.  
  
"Well, what I remember from all those times paying my respects to some poor dockhand I'd barely met," went on John, shuffling further along the aisle and running his hands over the pew legs and bench bottoms, "is the endless _kneeling_. God, my legs hurt just thinking about it. I swear, by the time I left home I'd spent enough time on my knees to last the rest of my life."  
  
"That makes one of us," muttered Strachey under his breath. John's mouth quirked, but he went on as if he hadn't heard, making his way down the rows as Sherlock loomed over his shoulder.  
  
"My mother always made sure we were there early, to get in some kneeling before the service. Then we all stood, and knelt, and sat, and knelt, and stood, and _knelt_. And then after the bloody thing was over we waited around kneeling some more. My brothers and I used to pinch each other black and blue, just to shake the boredom. But if I were going to be retrieving some kind of secret letter every Sunday, without anyone else noticing, I know when I'd find it easiest."  
  
"While kneeling," Sherlock said, eyes trained on John's haunches as he crawled along.  
  
"Too right. These were High Church people, they would have had a communion line. Which would have meant a lot of milling about, shifting positions, people's attention scattered everywhere. And then when they came _back_ from taking communion, there would have been an interminable period of —" he broke off, his fingers coming into contact with something under the seat of a pew next to the aisle.  
  
"— kneeling," he finished, straightening up so that the others could see.  
  
Sherlock's eyes were wide, sea-grey and shining, unnervingly luminous. Keynes and Strachey both looked a bit taken aback. "Watson...!" Sherlock breathed, and his smile was utterly delighted as he knelt down to look beneath the seat.  
  
Recessed deep into the underside of the bench, snug against the vertical support, was an elongated cast-iron box bolted to the wood with short screws. It resembled a heavy-duty mail slot, but extended backward into a rectangle about a foot square. Sherlock straightened up, still sitting on the floor, and looked breathlessly at John, hand scrabbling in his waistcoat pocket. "You deduced it," he said, gaping. "Before I did." He looked ravenous. John stared back at him, feeling as if all the air had been sucked out of his lungs.  
  
"I'll have to write to my mother," he murmured. "And thank her."  
  
Then Sherlock's hand came out of his waistcoat pocket, and John thought at first that he was holding a flask, that they were about to drink to the novelty of John's out-deducing Sherlock on a case. The next moment, as Sherlock turned back toward the metal box, John realised that it was actually a vest pocket torch. Sherlock shone the dim electric light over the box's surfaces, inside and out. Then he ran a gloved hand into the slot and scraped out some dirt and detritus, carrying it into the shaft of sun still filtering through the stonework windows. Everyone watched in silence as he brought the palmful of dirt to his nose and sniffed. When his tongue snaked out and tasted at it, delicate, Strachey recoiled slightly and Keynes leaned forward.  
  
"Ashes?" hazarded Keynes. "Clay?" "Tea," said Sherlock, thoughtfully. "Very clever."  
  
"Tea?" said John and Strachey in unison, then chuckled at themselves.  
  
Sherlock glanced up sharply at the two of them. "Yes," he affirmed, his hauteur back in place. "Tea. More evidence, as if it were needed, that young Miss Summerson is not all her mother might hope."  
  
"I'm sorry," said John, feeling he was rapidly losing ground, "but how does finding tea fragments in that box prove anything of the kind? Maybe Miss Whitmore herself left them there. Maybe someone else entirely has been using the box."  
  
"Don't be ridiculous, Watson," Sherlock snapped. "Really, what must it be like to have such a pedestrian mind? These leaves are obviously not eighty years old; they would have completely degraded in that time. Their scent is still fresh, though I believe the specific varietal is an aged one. It's an old Chinese preparation, not often seen in the West, but perfect, I imagine, for Miss Summerson's purposes. As for the likelihood of an unconnected stranger happening on that box..."  
  
Sherlock's disparaging look and dismissive wave finished his sentence for him. He turned on his heel, and John wondered for a moment if he had imagined the breathless joy of a few minutes before. Something in his chest, which had expanded almost painfully under the brilliance of Sherlock’s breathless smile, collapsed back inward.  
  
But this was better, he told himself firmly. Comforting. This was the distance he was accustomed to, that he relied on, with Sherlock.  
  
Then Sherlock was sweeping back down the aisle, overcoat billowing around his legs.  
  
"Come along," he was calling over his shoulder, "I need to check the church register, and then Mr. Strachey must show us to the nearest telegraph office."

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. I'm relying on Sarah Waters's _Fingersmith_ for Holywell Street as a London hotbed of the Victorian porn business.
> 
> 2\. Butterfield was a real architect who really did design the church of St. Mary Magdalene in West Lavington, Sussex. For more information, and a few less-than-awesome images, see [here](http://%20www.sussexparishchurches.org/content/view/608/33/). Butterfield did design this church with Manning in mind, though I monkeyed with the chronology a bit to make the construction further along in 1841 - in reality it probably wouldn't have been usable then, as it wasn't completed until 1850. As such it probably wasn't the actual location of Manning's secret rites of confession (which did actually happen, at least according to Strachey).
> 
> 3\. Charleston was a farmhouse purchased by Vanessa Bell for her lover Duncan Grant and his lover David Garnett to wait out WWI as conscientious objectors. After the war it became a popular place for Bloomsbury folks to work, play, and otherwise hang out, especially in the summer. These days it's preserved as a museum.
> 
> 4\. From Robert Skidelsky’s biography of Keynes: “He used to say that his best ideas came from ‘messing about with figures and _seeing what they must mean_ ’ (italics added). [...] The truth seems to be that numbers were for him simply clues, triggers of the imagination, rather like anecdotes are for the non-mathematically minded. People often talked about the ‘magical’ quality of his mind.” Holmesian, no?


	5. Hurry up please it's time

***

249 16.0 OR WLV 757P JUNE 17 1920  
BILLY MORRIGAN, 48C WHITE HORSE RD, LONDON ENGLAND  
  
HAVE JOB FOR YOU BILLY STOP MAKE ME LIST OF SHOPS ON LIMEHOUSE CAUSEWAY OR PENNYFIELDS RD SELLING COMPRESSED AGED TEA KNOWN AS TUO CHA ALSO KNOWN AS PU ERH STOP SHAPED LIKE SONGBIRD NESTS STOP  
  
AM OWED FAVOUR BY MR YANG PENG OF LOWELL ST WHO WILL NOT ATTRACT SUSPICION ASKING IN THE SHOPS STOP  
  
PLS THEN MUSTER OTHER IRREGULARS TO WATCH ALL ENTRANCES OF ALL SHOPS WHERE PU ERH IS SOLD STOP LET YOURSELF BE SEEN STOP WIRE IF YOU SEE A WHITE WOMAN REPEATEDLY AT WINDOWS STOP HOLMES

***

 

The violet light was still staining the sky as the four men stepped out of the telegraph ofﬁce and the clerk locked the door behind them. Efﬁciency, when it worked in his favour, was a great satisfaction to Sherlock, and successfully catching the ofﬁce in the last few minutes before a twelve-hour closure had him practically whistling. The foursome wound its way on foot toward the Bricklayer's Arms, the pub attached to the inn; as John was regaling Strachey with his childhood memories of Manning's funeral, Sherlock, mischievous quirk to his mouth, sped up to walk with Keynes.  
  
"I am told, Mr. Keynes," he said, in a tone John would have called ominously pleasant, "that you have an interest in probability."  
  
Keynes replied with a surprised afﬁrmative, and Sherlock, though not facing him, gave a shark-like grin.  
  
"I see. In that case I wonder if you might clear up a few points."  
  
By the time they had arrived at the pub, Sherlock and Keynes were locked in a spirited but incomprehensible debate on the more esoteric facets of probability theory, with Sherlock questioning Keynes so aggressively that John was tempted to come to the smaller man's aid. One amused shake of the head from Strachey, however, and he sat back to watch.  
  
By the arrival of the main course, John was no longer in the slightest doubt of Keynes's ability to defend his mathematical methods against any comers, even genius consulting detectives. He and Strachey were also bored stiff — neither of them having gotten a word in for the entire length of the meal — and slightly drunk, as all those silent minutes had been occupied in sampling the local selection of ales. Sometime around the pudding course, when Sherlock and Keynes's argument still showed no signs of abating, Strachey mentioned that he had a bottle of port back in his room at the inn. John was only too happy to take the hint.  
  
It was a relief to escape the drone of non-deterministic events and stochastic processes, and to breathe in the cool and quiet of the June evening in the deserted streets of suppertime. John noted vaguely, as they walked in silence along the cobblestones and through the door of the inn, that Strachey was smoking one of the cigarettes he had cadged off Sherlock earlier.  
  
In Strachey's room, a small table and chairs sat by a window that overlooked the main street. They sat, smoking and sipping the sweet wine. John was restless in the quiet; the alcohol and enforced passivity over supper had put him in an expansive mood, and Strachey's knowledge of a few surprisingly intimate details of John's own life made him bold with questions.  
  
"Are you and Keynes — are you involved, then?" John asked.  
  
Strachey choked a bit on his port. "Maynard and I — heavens, no. Lord knows what we are, Maynard and I." He sighed. "I suppose it's a certain sort of involvement to be always falling in love with the same people, and breaking each other's hearts by stealing them away from one another."  
  
"Has that happened a lot, then?" John was smiling a little.  
  
"Too much, yes!" He was looking enormously aggrieved, some of it for show. "The blighter’s purloined three of my ﬂames at least, snatched them from my very arms. In one case I was most desperately in love." Strachey smoked on with a sidelong glance at John, the picture of wounded dignity.  
  
John's smile grew into a laugh. Living with Sherlock alerted a person to sins of omission. "And how many have you stolen from him?"  
  
Strachey pouted, harumphed. "I really couldn't say." Putting on a parody of casualness. At a pair of raised eyebrows from John: "Three as well. Possibly four." John kept on with the eyebrows, and so he added: "I don't believe he cared as much for them, however." Strachey was ﬁnally unable to resist his own chuckle, and relaxed out of his mock-outrage, looked at John through the lashes of languid eyes. "So, perhaps we're friends, Maynard and I. Do we seem friendly to you, John Watson?"  
  
"I'm not sure lover-stealing is an approved game among friends. But you two seem...comfortable together, I suppose."  
  
"My dear man, if you spend any time at all in my circle, you will come to accept that 'lover-stealing' is practically a requirement of friendship."  
  
This surprised a laugh out of John. "Do you prefer Keynes's lovers in particular, then? Or will anyone's do?"  
  
Strachey was taken aback for a moment, then laughed. "He and I do seem unable to resist a little competition on that score. I couldn't tell you…" His look became thoughtful, distant, then he resumed. "After — after some time goes by, after we've both been in love with someone, and the fellow has left us both. Then there is a sense of — of intimacy. Yes." Strachey sipped his port, eyes unfocused. "And he does," he added, "have the most remarkable eyes."  
  
John' stomach gave a lurch; he felt suddenly unsteady. "Well," he said, clearing his throat. "Here's to friends, yes? The remarkable eyes of our friends."  
  
The look Strachey gave him then stretched out painfully. John was about to turn away at last, ﬂustered, when Strachey reached out his glass, touched it to John's, drained it off in one go, and sat back, holding eye contact the entire time. "Dear me," he murmured. "And now you've left him alone with Maynard."  
  
The silence spiraled.  
  
Somewhere in John's mind he knew that this was the time for strenuous denials, but instead he felt something in his chest just — break. There was a cavernous pit in him; and at the bottom, current arced like electricity through steel wool. In love with Sherlock Holmes, then. Bloody hell, he thought, there will be no stopping it now. And he groaned aloud.  
  
Strachey reached out, and stroked John's hands lightly where they were suddenly cradling his head. John looked up into a pair of green eyes, still sad despite Strachey's attempt at a smile. "Don't worry," Strachey said softly. "I haven't done anything to, ah, awaken Maynard's competitive streak. In any case he's currently in love with Sebastian." John stared down at his glass, his thoughts moving at tangents to Strachey’s speech.  
  
"Holmes is always claiming the body is nothing but 'transport,' nothing but a vehicle for his experiments. I — What? What's funny?"  
  
Strachey shook his head, still chuckling. "I was just recalling our Cambridge days. Screaming at Maynard because he kept a notebook with the vital statistics of all his lovers, so he could run the numbers later. Shouting at him after supper at the Apostles, vitriol about buggering an economist, what rubbish it was."  
  
"Jesus. If there were ever a way to seduce Holmes, that story would be it."  
  
"Be grateful they didn't meet back then. Maynard was a caution, albeit one utterly devoid of poetry and unaccountably obsessed with Bertrand's Paradox. He used to wedge an envelope in the doorjamb of his rooms when he, er, wasn't to be disturbed, and I swear there were weeks when the thing never budged. Who knows what condition your Holmes might have been returned in."  
  
John's smile faded; he sighed. "In much the same condition as always, I should imagine. The unsullied and untouchable Sherlock Holmes."  
  
Strachey's lips quirked, his eyes cast down. "Untouchable, good heavens. If I lived in your ﬂat I should hardly be able to keep my hands to myself."  
  
His cigarette stubbed out, said hands were now folding and unfolding the corners of a piece of newsprint on the table. John's gaze locked onto the pressing and ﬁdgeting of pale, tapered ﬁngers. Mesmerized, his voice came low and slow.  
  
"I do, you know. Sometimes I can barely keep myself from —. Touch comes so easily to him, well it would since it means nothing, and those goddamn hands. His goddamn fucking hands." John shook his head, scrubbed his knuckles over his eyes. "Christ, I can't believe I'm having this conversation with you, we barely know each other. I must be drunker than I realised. I suppose we could both blackmail the other into penury at this point, so why worry."  
  
"Lord knows," sighed Strachey, balling up the scrap of newspaper at last, "I'm no stranger to indecency. Or heartbreak."  
  
Slowly and very deliberately, Strachey laid his hands on the table, just at the spot where John's gaze had resettled. Hearts beat messy in the silence.  
  
And then John's own sturdy hands dragged up across the tabletop and touched obsessively over and under the slender ﬁngers, holding and handling and reveling in the length and the cool texture of them, the whorled pads and articulate, articulated joints. There was a sparking under his skin and a stirring under his clothes and he knew he should stop this but his head was clouding and he could not remember quite why he should. In one part of himself the simple release and kindness of touch was so glorious, so long denied; and in another part he was conscious of every single detail which proved these long ﬁngers were not Sherlock's ﬁngers — no burn scar on the right ring ﬁnger, no violin string calluses; and in a third part of himself he could unfocus his eyes and breathe in the scent of Sherlock's smoking tobacco and ﬁnally, ﬁnally twine his ﬁngers around delicate white wrist-bones, and he only heard the low, helpless moan after it had left his throat.  
  
What was more frightening? That he knew all the intimate proofs that this could not be Sherlock, or that he wanted so desperately to pretend that it was?  
  
And then the man across the table was rising to meet his lips, and at the unexpected scratch of whiskers on his cheeks and his mouth John was pulling away, stumbling to his feet and mumbling "Sorry, Christ, sorry," and then the man was behind him and a voice was speaking low, hands gripping his shoulders and guiding him backward, until the man's back was against the wall and his hands were reaching around to John's front and unfastening his ﬂies and the voice was whispering in his ear, "It's all right, it's all right, just let me give you a little comfort."  
  
Strachey's voice would never be Sherlock's burred baritone, but at a whisper the difference was less pronounced. John was pressed close and smothering in the scent of Sherlock's cigarettes, and the voice said, "You can watch my hands," and clever ﬁngers reached in through his trousers and pants and circled his aching cock and his insides were sparking and shorting and he was dizzy with it. Strachey was craning his head to the side so as not to brush John's neck with his beard; John thought wildly for a moment that he might, if he wanted, lean back to kiss and kiss the smooth lines of Sherlock's jaw.  
  
He looked down at the thin digits freeing him from his trousers, near sobbing at the soft drag of the thumb-pad and the contrast of pale ﬁngers against the ﬂushed pulsing length of him, those near-familiar, near-perfect hands closing around him, drawing back his foreskin, and the hands were moving on him now, one ﬁrm at the root of his cock and one stroking, dancing over the wet head, and he should stop it, he should stop it, but the sculpted thumb like Sherlock's was dragging over his slit and the warm white ﬁst was twisting slightly around him, and if it had clearly been Sherlock he might have been able to stop it, and if it had clearly been someone other than Sherlock he might have been able to stop it, but the confusion of true-false-true-false was spinning in front of him and the roulette wheel of rage-grief-desire was whirling inside him, and he came apart with a low groan, biting at his lips to keep from crying out in any words at all.  
  
Then John was leaning forward, panting. He heard Strachey draw in breath as if about to speak, and felt he would crawl out of his own skin rather than hear the words that would come. He closed his eyes and twisted his frame around, clapping a hand hard over Strachey's surprised lips, and for a moment they both just stood and breathed through nose and mouth. John gave a rough push with the hand covering Strachey's mouth, as if to seal it closed. He felt the other man nod, slowly, and so he slid down to his knees with eyes still closed, and fumbled with Strachey's trousers, and wasn't even sure, as he took him into his mouth, if he was trying to communicate apology, or thanks, or a plea, or something else entirely.

 

***

  
Back from the Bricklayer's Arms, slumped in the sitting room of the Black Horse Inn, Sherlock was forced to admit defeat. He had bullied and condescended, pursued and debated, and, apart from the opportunity to brush up on his calculus, he had absolutely nothing to show for it. Far from exposing and cataloguing the expected intellectual shortcomings of John Maynard Keynes, Sherlock's three and a half hours of full-bore cross examination seemed to have left his subject pleasantly invigorated and ready to continue well into the night. What's more, and much to his annoyance, Sherlock had not managed to locate a single flaw in Keynes's explications of probability and number theory, nor in his impassioned but — Sherlock ground his teeth as he admitted it to himself — _logical_ arguments about the economic dangers of the policy surrounding German reparations.  
  
He sat back and regarded Keynes with an eerie feeling borne of fighting a full-fledged war against an opponent who has, all along, been playing at Capture-the-Flag. But that didn't make sense, Sherlock thought. He was an expert at remaining logical during debate, at avoiding over- investment in the outcome, at playing his adversary for his own purposes. And Sherlock — Sherlock didn't even _care_ about mathematical modeling, or German war reparations. Those things weren't the source of his distaste for Keynes, not in themselves. No, the dissonance came when Sherlock tried to hold in his mind at one time Keynes's undeniable intelligence, and — and —  
  
"Made up with Sebastian, did you?" Sherlock asked.  
  
Keynes was taken aback at the change of subject, and at the use of his lover’s Christian name, but was willing enough to accommodate. "Ah, well, not completely," he admitted. "I tried to make it up before leaving, but, ah, he wasn't quite ready, yet. I do think it will all come right, before long. You know how these things are."  
  
Sherlock chewed his lip, did not answer. Found he had reached into his inner coat pocket and was toying with the bundle of Charlotte Whitmore's letters. He drew them out, held them. Worried at their corners with his fingers.  
  
"Watson thinks," he said, "that these letters were composed as spontaneous outpourings of desire and affection."  
  
"And you don't." It was more of a statement than a question.  
  
"The woman who was intellectually and experientially _able_ to write such things —"  
  
Keynes waited, but Sherlock's throat seemed to have closed on him. His mouth chewed at the absence of sound. "Yes?" Keynes prompted.  
  
"She would be too intelligent to mean them," Sherlock blurted out.  
  
Keynes reached over and eased the bundle of letters from Sherlock's grip where he had been fidgeting at them. Unfolded them one by one, and smoothed them out on the table in front of him, petted them as he read. Then he leaned back in his chair, though his eyes remained on the table, where the letters rested alongside the black moleskine notebook in which he had hastily sketched an illustration of a Markov Chain. His pen was still in his hand, making idle notations on the blank facing page.  
  
"If only that were true, Mr. Holmes," he sighed, sad and wry, "if only that were true. The things Duncan could show you, that I saw fit to put into writing — well," he corrected, laughing without much humour, "on second thought, never ask him. He probably _would_ show you." He considered. "For that matter, even Lytton could hand over enough to get me years of hard labour."  
  
"Is it always like that for you?" asked Sherlock, the words tumbling over each other. "Like it was the other night, with Sebast — Mr. Sprott?"  
  
"With most of my lovers it's like that at times," said Keynes, carefully. "With others it's a good deal worse." A pause. "With Duncan, it was a good deal worse."  
  
"And how do you — the work, how do you keep up with your work when so much of your energy is — is elsewhere?"  
  
Keynes jotted figures absently for long seconds as he considered. "I really thought I might go mad, over Duncan," he said at last. "I was concerned, about my work. I felt — cut off, for a time. But I think," he paused again, "that all that messy business is what makes the work — what makes the work _important_. I don't know if sitting in a Cambridge lecture hall, or writing about supply and demand for manufactured goods, can exactly," he laughed, "save civilisation. I hope it may make some difference. But without, I don’t know — without art-making, and love-making, and the playing of music — I certainly wouldn't be carrying on with the rest of it."  
  
They sat in silence for a long space as Sherlock digested this and Keynes jotted absently on the pad.  
  
Keynes said at last, "Are they so different, a passion for one's work and a passion for one's lovers? Isn't it possible that the one would play off of, even feed the other? And you can't tell me," he said, looking up with a little smile, "that you aren't passionate about your work."  
  
Sherlock looked away. "Watson wouldn't —" he started. "Watson sees it differently."  
  
Keynes continued notating, his face without expression. "Maybe," he said.  
  
Another long pause followed, and then Sherlock breathed out. "Well," he said, a shade more briskly, "what do _you_ make of these controversial letters?"  
  
Keynes looked down at his notebook, looking slightly surprised at the three columns of numbers jotted there. He stared down at them for almost a full minute, saying nothing. "Well," he said then, "actually."  
  
It was Sherlock's turn to prompt. "Actually?" he asked, and looked over at the rows of numbers as well.  
  
"There is something a bit interesting here," said Keynes. He shook his head, as if backing up a bit, and gestured to the notebook. "This is just a sort of — of game I play when I find myself in conversation, something to keep my hands busy. Like, ah, like some people make sketches."  
  
There was a certain weight to the phrase "some people," as if Sherlock would have forgotten the painters in Keynes's life.  
  
"I've always seen best into patterns of numbers, rather than pictures or words, so when I was sitting in lectures at Cambridge I would absentmindedly do these transformations on blocks of text, giving them a numerical equivalent. I would jot down the number of words in a sentence, you understand, that's this column, and then the number of letters in the first word, that's the second column, and then the last column is number of letters in the last word. You see?"  
  
Sherlock nodded, spun the notebook a half-turn so that they could both read the columns of figures.  
  
"This kind of — economist's doodling, or what have you, it's become a kind of habit. There are interesting patterns; some writers or types of writing favour shorter or longer sentences, for example, and with some people the middle column is strongly dominated by ones, because —"  
  
"Because they start all their sentences with 'I'," supplied Sherlock, and Keynes smiled.  
  
"Yes indeed. But this, I don't normally see. Look at the first and third columns, here. This is for one letter only, you see, the one dated 18 September 1840, but there seems to be an unexpected correlation. Look here, whenever a sentence is three words long — it happens thrice, you'll notice — the final word is _also_ three letters. And there are two sentences of 26 words each," he pointed them out in their columns, "and _both_ end in eight-letter words. I've never seen it before," he finished, bemusedly.  
  
" _I_ have," said Sherlock, and he was drawing the notebook toward him across the table, eyes gleaming.  
  
"Have you indeed?" Keynes asked, and Sherlock nodded. "What's it all about then?"  
  
"I can't be sure," said Sherlock, purloining Keynes's pen and uncapping it, "but it looks exactly like a book cipher."  
  
"A what?"  
  
Sherlock looked up impatiently. "A book cipher. One number refers to a page number, the other to the number of words down the page." He was now almost fully immersed in drawing columns over the next few pages of Keynes's notebook, and smoothing out the next letter down in the pile.  
  
"So this is a kind of — of double code?" Keynes asked. "Text transformed into numbers, transformed back into text?"  
  
Sherlock only grunted, and after that stopped registering the other man's attempts at conversation. When he looked up from his work an hour or so later he noted vaguely that Keynes must have gone to bed — or at least, he was no longer in evidence in the sitting room. Sherlock went back to work, and was still huddled at his table with Keynes's notebook, next to the dying embers of the fire, when John shut the door of Strachey's bedroom softly behind him, stepped out into the hallway, and looked straight into the grey eyes of his flatmate. He froze in his steps.  
  
"I — ah," said Sherlock, gesturing at the letters, the notebook, the fire. And then staring back in shock at that particular door, and at John standing in front of it.  
  
They both stood, eyes riveted on one another for half a minute. Then John gave his curt, military nod, and padded down the hall, latching his own door firmly behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. A visual image of a pu'erh tuocha (nest) can be found [here](http://www.chicagoteagarden.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/product_full/rose_puerh_tuocha_01.jpg). This method of preparing and aging tea dates back hundreds of years in China, and at one point scored bricks of condensed tea were even being used as currency along trade routes. Aged pu'erh is currently hip among collectors of high-end tea, but in 1920 it would have been all but unheard-of to most non-Chinese people.
> 
> 2\. Strachey's comments about Keynes here are inspired by a letter to Leonard Woolf, from December 5th 1906: "As for Keynes — I can't help recognising that, in the obvious sense, he is my friend. Yet sometimes, when he says something, the whole thing seems to vanish into air, and I see him across an infinite gulf of indifference. That there should be anyone in the world so utterly devoid of poetry is sufficiently distracting; and, when I reflect that somebody is Maynard, I can't be surprised at my cracking jokes on him with the Corporal about empty biscuit-boxes, and yet. How well I know that he'ld do most things one could think of for me, and his eyes — !"
> 
> 3\. On the intimacy of sharing a lover, from July 21 1908, after Keynes "stole" Duncan Grant from Strachey: "Dear Maynard, I only know that we've been friends for too long to stop being friends now. There are some things that I shall try not to think of, and you must do your best to help me in that; and you must believe that I do sympathise and don't hate you and that if you were here I should probably kiss you, except that Duncan would be jealous, which would never do!"
> 
> 4\. The notebook thing is a real-life deal. Keynes kept two separate diaries of his sexual encounters; one of them was even in code. See [The Sex Diaries of John Maynard Keynes](http://moreintelligentlife.com/node/824). Seriously, what could be more Sherlock Holmes than this story? Nothing, that's what.
> 
> 5\. Duncan Grant was one of the great loves of both Strachey's and Keynes's lives, although both of their affairs with him were relatively short-lived. After Grant left Keynes, Keynes remained his benefactor and financial supporter for more or less the rest of their lives, even after Keynes was married and Duncan was settled with Vanessa and Clive Bell.
> 
> 6\. [Here](http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/13/1345/BQ4S000Z/posters/dora-carrington-lytton-strachey-1880-1932-1916.jpg)'s a visual of Strachey's long, Holmes-like fingers, courtesy of his sometimes-lover Carrington.


	6. Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed

18 August 1841  
  
My beloved Scot,  
  
I had sworn to be patient while you were away, to be quiet and constant and placid. We escape censure, we fine upstanding women. As you ken. Here is what I imagined: that I would be calm in all of my thoughts, since you would not be here to stir them; that I would move with clean deliberation, since you would not be present to disorder my steps; that I would bend gracefully under the yoke of any tyrant, since in your absence I could recognize no smaller dissatisfactions. I recall thinking that I might even rejoice in a return to stark purity; that, knowing I would soon have you back again, I could enjoy a temporary tranquility — or some approximation. I'd make my placid way, I thought, from church to hospital to shop, with a waiting heart and a blank mind. And I would stow away the thought of you, silk wrapped in a cedar box, as small as could be. All day I would be resolutely cold, with that burning ember safely boxed away, and I would take it out and warm myself only at night, solitary and withdrawn.  
  
Oh love, instead I am scalding. I stumble and I scorch; I blaze, my very skin burns with you and forms itself again, and burns, and forms again some charred and livid amalgamation. I laugh now, to imagine containing the thought of you, wrapping it up safe while I feign disinterestedness. It is, I find, no mere ember. No, it's ravenous, snarling fire. It's a blazing beast and it licks and it bites and it tears at me, and at the shops and the hospital it's all I think of. Even in the church I want nothing except to let it consume me, pressed down among the roses and chrysanthemums.  
  
And here is what the beast in my breast is made of: it is made of happening upon you unexpectedly, and feeling, at the unforeseen glimpse of your honey-dark nape, near asphyxiated. Your spine, bent beautifully. And oh, your wine-rich skin.  
  
The beast is made of my fingers digging in the dip above your hip through your fine light cottons, of tasting and tasting that bone at your back, my heart accelerating. It's made of your soft cries and your turning, your biting and breathing and scraping teeth and lips against my cheekbones and my mouth.  
  
The beast is made of my peeling back your layers, your fine wools and your linens; of spreading you before me on my stretched white sheets; of all that wild dusky landscape of your skin, like honey and olive and sweet almond at your hips and shoulders; of silken jetty locks in the hollows at the bases of your limbs; of my sinking down and kneeling into you and how you cry out for me like nothing comprehensible.  
  
The beast's made of my lapping and kissing at the core of you, pressing and suckling and the feel of you stiffening against my tongue. Of my ravening for you so that I'm dizzy as I gently pull and pull at you: slow increase, tender intensification. Of your gasping breath, of your pulse beneath me; of knowing I must faint unless I take more of you and so I draw back my lips and press around your edges with my teeth, all bare. Of you arching into me then, pleading indiscriminately. Thrusting your hips into my pressing teeth and tongue, your bowstringed spine and your shaking limbs and I reach my hands under you and feel the slide and clench of us, heartbreaking synchronization. Of starving for more, more. Of stretching you open, one hand digging into your slippery back and the other pushing inside you, curling and clenching and dragging you back onto my tongue, immaculate and agonizing. Of tasting you beating, beating, and I. I push, push toward a conflagration.  
  
The beast is made of the instant of taut stillness when your breath catches and your voice stills and your body constricts around me perfectly motionless — and it is made of the pulsing brilliance of the long seconds after, when you shatter and shudder in my mouth and my hands and I feel my heart must burst with you, with the knowledge of all the melting beauty of you and of us. And the greedy animal feeds even on the long languid minutes after — never quite as quiet and unhurried as we would wish — when I stretch against you with my ear against your breast and listen as your breath drags, pounds, and then steadies, acclimatises.  
  
How shall I walk the village streets, love, with such a beast in my breast, feasting on all my joys and angers? What am I to do until you return to me, until you sate it with your own cool consciousness? Shall I dream only of you down all my days, and the moment my thoughts wander, shall I see only you in all your paradoxes and correspondences? You are my all. Oh my love, come back to me.  
  
Yours always,  
CW

 

***

  
Breakfast the following morning was decidedly awkward. John and Strachey were sheepish with one another, Sherlock brittle and polite with John, John reserved with Sherlock, and Sherlock and Strachey wary of each other. The only cheerful member of the foursome was Keynes, who was out of bed with the larks. He practically hummed as he poured out his breakfast coffee.  
  
"Holmes!" he exclaimed, hurrying over to the detective as Sherlock emerged from the corridor, clutching the London shipping news, "I must tell you, our chat yesterday evening was the most stimulating I've had in ages. You wouldn't believe the abysmal standard of conversation at Cambridge these days. Not to _mention_ the Treasury, all those government types." He shuddered playfully, the grin never leaving his face.  
  
Sherlock looked grim. "Believe me," he intoned, sitting down and glaring at the list of ships, "I know all about the deadliness of _government types_."  
  
Keynes chuckled merrily. John dragged into view and pulled up a seat, followed a few minutes later by Strachey. "And this mystery of yours," Keynes said, "I'm _quite_ taken with it. Been thinking about those letters all morning. Do tell, what's next? Code- breaking? A return to the scene of the crime? I _am_ eager to get to the bottom of it all."  
  
Sherlock, somewhat wrongfooted by the novelty of _not_ being the most enthusiastic member of an investigation, made an effort to pull himself together, shoving his paper to one side. "Mrs. Summerson has authorised us — me — me and Watson, to inspect the cottage where Caldonia Summerson was living before her disappearance. And someone should stop by the local hall of records, see if anything remains from the household of Miss Whitmore's Henfield aunt and uncle — and that of Archdeacon Hare, Manning's last-minute benefactor."  
  
Keynes looked delighted. "Well then! That sounds a full morning. Perhaps you and I can visit the Summerson cottage, while Lytton and Dr. Watson —"  
  
"No." John and Sherlock spoke almost simultaneously, John glaring at his teacup and Sherlock at Strachey. The tension of the moment must have made some impression even on Keynes's determined cheer, because he looked uncomfortably from one man to the other.  
  
"Watson prefers," Sherlock blurted out, "scenes of action to those of book research," and John was so shocked at this unwonted solicitude for his preferences, that he left off glaring.  
  
"Well...good," said Keynes slowly, "so do I, this soon after term's end. Perhaps Dr. Watson and I can look into the Summerson girl's house, and you and Lytton —"  
  
"We can all go together," interrupted John in a rush, as Sherlock made a kind of strangled noise. "We'll all go to the Summerson house together. The records office can wait until this afternoon." He glanced nervously at Sherlock. After a moment, the detective gave a brisk nod, and the other three exhaled.  
  
"Capital!" Keynes said, showing an impressive commitment to being in high spirits. "The Summerson house it is."

 

***

  
June Lane, narrow and cobbled, stretched east behind the churchyard into a cluster of freestanding cottages tucked back into well-kept gardens. It was flanked on either side by high stone retaining walls, against which the four men flattened themselves at each approaching clatter of horse or lorry. Sherlock, striding ahead of the other three, gave a hiss of annoyance at every pause.  
  
It wasn't the delay to his investigation, heaven knew, that was so irritating the detective. He was in no doubt whatsoever as to the activities of Miss Caldonia Summerson, and it needed only a few tedious loose ends tidied away before the thing would be proven to the satisfaction of even the cotton-headed DI Lestrade. Sherlock was certain that Miss Summerson's situation was not time- sensitive, and was hardly in a hurry to arrive at the cottage, where he was in no suspense about what they would find.  
  
Furnished rooms, a wardrobe surprisingly full, and correspondence from family only.  
  
No traveling bag, as it would already be packed.  
  
A small quantity of carefully-selected pieces of frippery, probably in questionable taste yet of surprising quality     considering Miss Summerson's station.  
  
Perhaps, if Sherlock was lucky (though it would be no great matter either way) traces of the same aged, compressed Chinese tea found at the church.  
  
It did not, Sherlock thought, take a genius to work out the details.  
  
No, Sherlock's only real interest in Callie Summerson was in discovering her exact connection with the late Miss Whitmore. His agreement to this joint outing had been an attempt to give himself a bit of space and time, to clear a head which was unacceptably full of —  
  
_all that messy business is what makes the work important_  
  
— unacceptably _clotted_ with images of John, half an hour before stepping back through Strachey's bedroom door and staring into Sherlock's eyes. An hour before. Five bloody minutes before. Sherlock's gut clenched. What _exactly_ had been happening behind that door, while Sherlock had been conversing with Keynes in the next room?  
  
(Vaguely, Sherlock noted that they were arriving at their destination. The place was a brick-and- tile rowhouse, on the far end of the only set of working-class dwellings in the entire street. He slipped the key into the lock; stood aside as Keynes remarked, "Pre-furnished, by the look of these pieces"; and then followed the others through the front door.)  
  
What had John permitted? What had he performed? Sherlock's eyes clenched shut against the memory of the dusty, bagged knees of John's trousers: he had knelt on the floor. His mouth faintly swollen, bee-stung: had sucked or bitten, or been sucked or bitten. But the skin around the mouth had been smooth, no whisker-marks. No kissing. Could it be that John disliked kissing? It was _impossible_ , not knowing.  
  
("Wardrobe still quite full," John remarked to the group at large, bending at the waist to glance inside it. "Look at all these clothes. She couldn't have packed for a long trip.")  
  
Where, how had Strachey touched him? Mouth — nape — collarbone — navel? Eyelids — instep — cock — sternum? For how long? With what results? If Sherlock had been closer, the side of his face pressed up against the door, what soft noises would have dropped into his ear? If Sherlock had been closer still, on the other side of the door —  
  
Strachey, Sherlock supposed, had been planning this for some time. Had he intended to seduce John when he had stood in Gordon Square and offered to help with Sherlock's investigation? Sherlock's jaw tightened.  
  
("Packet of letters here," Strachey was saying, discarding the ribbon tie without a second glance. "They all seem to be from her mother.")  
  
And John had trusted Strachey immediately with knowledge he'd kept from Sherlock for two years. Had Strachey pursued John, or — Sherlock's stomach twisted — had it been the other way around? Perhaps John had clapped eyes on Strachey and been immediately intrigued, immediately drawn to him in a way he wasn't to Sherlock. These last few days, all the time John been riding in the train, deducing the church hiding place by Sherlock's side, smiling into Sherlock's eyes, had he been thinking of getting Strachey alone? Had he read Miss Whitmore's letters and thought of Strachey?  
  
(John was looking under the bed, lifting up the crocheted coverlet. "What I don't find," he was saying, "is any kind of traveling bag.")  
  
And what was all this to Sherlock, in any case? Whence this sudden consuming need? He had given up all that business years ago. He had given it up for the sake of a clean, calm, fathomless mind. For the work.  
  
_Are they so different, a passion for one's work and a passion for one's lovers?_  
  
But his mind today was littered, swollen. Stretched too warm, too tight. He thought of Keynes, jotting figures in Sherlock's notebook, disagreeing with Sherlock about Miss Whitmore, about her capacity for passionate love. Keynes, parrying flawlessly every advance of Sherlock's logic. Keynes, admitting that his own passion endangered his work. Keynes, telling quietly how it made the work mean something.  
  
("I could be wrong," said Keynes, pawing through the top drawer of the dresser by the bed. "but I'd swear these are real pearls. Look at 'em all! And this, I'm sure it's real mink. Bit steep on a serving-girl's wages.")  
  
It was all ridiculous, thought Sherlock. Surely he couldn't.  
  
(What if he could?)  
  
He would lose himself.  
  
(Keynes hadn't.)  
  
John would never.  
  
(What if he would?)  
  
If there was a trick to it, rules to holding mind and body together undamaged.  
  
(Charlotte Whitmore had done it.)  
  
He didn't know how.  
  
(He knew what she had done.) (He knew _exactly_ what she had done.)  
  
He couldn't.  
  
(Oh god, John.)  
  
Sherlock shook his head to clear it, pushed down firmly on this self-indulgence. He swept over at last to the tiny kitchen, pawed in the cabinetry, in the icebox. In the bin, next to the cookstove, was a ripped rice-paper wrapping. Sherlock sniffed it — earthy, aged tea leaves — then drew back to inspect the red lettering on translucent white paper. Illegible to English eyes, but lucky just the same.  
  
He turned on his heel and strode from the row-house, and was halfway down the lane before the other three realised he wasn't coming back.

 

***

  
Back in the sitting room of the Black Horse, John returned to the fire laden with mugs of Assam and plates of Stilton and sausages. The hot tea smell was calming and very welcome; this whole morning had been exhausting. There were now so many subjects that John was mentally avoiding, that navigating his own head felt like walking the thin edge of a honeycomb. The neat compartments of his mind were giving way to an unpredictable jumble of associations: Sherlock’s jawline, and aching to lean back and suck on it. Miss Whitmore’s letters, and Sherlock’s coldness this morning. Strachey’s fingers, and shouting at Ralph Partridge about Daniel and the war. Sherlock’s eyes glowing in the church pews, and those same eyes staring, shocky, as John emerged from Strachey’s room the night before. Sherlock’s hand on his shoulder, assuring John that the life of the body was of no importance at all.  
  
John shook himself, smiled at Keynes and Strachey as he sat down. "Holmes'll be swearing off taking tea for the duration, I expect. Doesn't eat much when he's on a case."  
  
Strachey pursed his lips, mock-aghast. "Are such things done on Albion's shores?"  
  
"What's the point of all that, that 'Albion' business?" asked John, settling into the cushions with his cup. "I've always wondered. Why not just say, ‘England’? It seems affected."  
  
"You know poets, Dr. Watson, they trade in the currency of affect." This from Keynes in the corner. John chuckled.  
  
"Philistines, you shock me." Strachey smiled, sighed, and adjusted his spectacles. "No honestly, they're the old Celtic and Roman names, aren't they? If Blake and Tennyson could agree on anything, it was the allure of the mythic past. Other countries have them as well, you know, 'Hibernia' for Ireland, and Switzerland is...what?"  
  
"Helvetia, isn't it," said Keynes, getting into the game. "And Hellas of course, for —"  
  
A muffled gasp came from Sherlock's table, and John snapped his head around to encounter wide grey eyes directed at Keynes instead of at Miss Whitmore's letters. "God, of _course_ ," Sherlock breathed. "It's with an e, not an exact match, but it was obviously close enough to suggest the name."  
  
Three puzzled faces stared back at him. Sherlock turned to Strachey, aggressive. "I'm not wrong, am I? In this archaic geography lexicon you're discussing, Scotland is known as..."  
  
Strachey's eyes widened. "Caledonia."  
  
Sherlock grinned, grabbed the sheaf of letters, waved them about. "These letters weren't written to a man from Scotland, or someone named Scot, at all. They were written to _Caldonia Shuttleworth_."  
  
Silence for a good five seconds, followed by an incredulous snort from Keynes's corner. "Sapphists!" he barked, then looked abashed at the volume of his voice. More quietly, he said "Trust us four to overlook the possibility. Sherlock should have invited Violet Trefusis instead. Or Mrs. Nicholson."  
  
Strachey snatched at the letters in in front of his face, looking vaguely offended. "Harpy Shuttleworth?” he said, incredulous. “Who on earth would do —” he gestured at the letters, “ _this_ , to _her_?”  
  
“I thought I made it clear that the answer to that is Miss. Charlotte. Whitmore,” said Sherlock, speaking through clenched teeth and slowly, as if Strachey were dim.  
  
“But what...what's all this about 'feel you stiffen against me'? These letters were written to a woman? Are you sure?"  
  
A pause, and John sighed. "You really have no idea of female anatomy, do you? Any of you?" Blank looks. Keynes fidgeting, Strachey with a moue of distaste. Sherlock still glaring, but curious. John sighed. "Yes, they could be written to a woman. There are analogous... stiffenings...of the female form." He hardly minded his own flushing, in the face of Strachey's comical squeamishness. The man looked about to faint. "Do you need more specifics?" John asked him. "I could draw up a —"  
  
"No! No," Strachey squawked, panic threatening in his voice. "That's quite enough, thank you." John noticed the corner of Sherlock's mouth quirking upward, and felt the tightness in his belly ease a fraction. He chuckled again. Keynes chuckled. Strachey glared, attempted to look dignified.  
  
"Well, then," said John, taking pity. "Hum. Holmes, is this the case cracked wide open, then? These two fine ladies were happily in love and that's the end of it? What, did Mrs. Shuttleworth's husband find out about them and force Miss Whitmore out of town?"  
  
Sherlock paced. "No, that doesn't work. Eighty years ago few husbands would have looked askance at a - ah - very close friendship between their wives and another woman. Kissing, declarations of love, even sleeping in the same bed...none of it was seen as a threat."  
  
"More recently than that, judging by the continued popularity of Miss Rossetti." Strachey was getting his own back. "Those letters have nothing on her. 'Suck my juices,' I ask you."  
  
Sherlock scowled at the interruption. "Yes, but more important, Watson’s hypothesis doesn't cover all the facts. Mrs. Shuttleworth's aversion to Manning _after_ Miss Whitmore's disappearance, for example, but seemingly not before. The women must have been using the compartment in the pew to exchange these letters — the darkened, isolated location would let Miss Whitmore slip away there without Manning noticing. She would have done it before or after her confession, on the way in or out of the church. Then Mrs. Shuttleworth could retrieve the letters at Sunday service...none of which explains how they ended up in the hands of Mr. Lear."  
  
"Manning probably found one of the letters," said John, ignoring this last question, "and however he reacted, it convinced Miss Whitmore that she needed to break things off. Of course her lover would be resentful."  
  
"Maybe." Sherlock was obviously unconvinced. "But still..." He looked at Keynes. "Do _you_ believe those number patterns you showed me are a coincidence?"  
  
"No," said Keynes, reaction instantaneous. "But I can't tell you what they do mean."  
  
Sherlock picked up the letters from their place on Strachey's side table and began to gesture with them as he paced. Three sets of eyes tracked his fevered movements. "They mean that Charlotte Whitmore was _clever_ ," he said in a rush, "very clever indeed.”  
  
"Think about her,” he continued, “really _think_. What was her game? She'd got Manning, the most powerful man in the diocese, convinced he was saving her soul from the machinations of Rome. If the news of their midnight meetings came out, it would be in both their interests for him to swear he was only intervening on her spiritual behalf, and his correspondence with his colleagues would reinforce that claim." He glanced at Strachey, who nodded, a bit stiffly.  
  
"Meanwhile, the same meetings were the perfect cover for her to leave these letters for her lover Mrs. Shuttleworth, using the recessed box in the pew. As Mr. _Strachey_ so helpfully told us, the church was still under construction in 1840, but the pews on that side would have been in place early — the aisles are a key component of the load-bearing structure, and that side of the building was least accessible, and would therefore be in place early. I wouldn't put it past Miss Whitmore to have engineered the hiding place herself, during construction.” He rubbed his hands together, maniacal.  
  
"The pseudonym 'Scot' is a blind to disguise her lover's sex, in case the letters were ever found by the wrong party, but it also diverts suspicion away from Manning himself, who had no particular connection to Scotland or the name. And she _signed_ these letters — well, initialed them anyway — another way of distracting any potential readers. She was sacrificing her own reputation, knowing that being questioned directly would give her a greater opportunity to sell a convincing cover story and disguise the others' identities. Charlotte, Charlotte," Sherlock was crooning, "what _else_ have you done?"  
  
The other three were gaping at the spectacle of Sherlock's long form sweeping frenziedly around the inn's small sitting room, John doing his utmost to school his eyes away from Sherlock's hands. Or his mouth. Or his backside, god. He blinked hard and asked, "What makes you think there's anything more to it than you just described?"  
  
Sherlock strode across the room and shoved Charlotte Whitmore's letters under John's nose. "These, Watson. And not just the —" gesturing at Keynes's corner, "— the interesting numerical patterns that Mr. Keynes pointed out to me last night, which in themselves suggest a book- or text-based cipher. Miss Whitmore was sexually involved with an inexperienced village matron, yet her letters are, as you pointed out on the train, explicit, even scandalous. Surely this kind of language is unnecessary to retain the affections of a woman like Caldonia Shuttleworth; I admit I'm a bit impressed Mrs. Shuttleworth wasn't alienated by it instead. If Miss Whitmore’s midnight confessions were a diversion from her love affair, and her pseudonyms and signatures were a diversion from the true identity of her lover, what about her _subject matter_? From what is _that_ meant to divert us?"  
  
Grey eyes were trained, electric, on John's, and John felt the familiar electric arc, along with a hopeless sinking sensation as he stared into them. He cleared his throat. "Maybe," he suggested gravely, "Charlotte Whitmore wrote passionate love letters because she was passionately in love."  
  
Sherlock took a step back, huffed quietly. "Charlotte Whitmore," he said, in a low voice, "was a Romantic. She engineered elaborate cover stories — probably over-elaborate — with secrets covering up for other secrets; she portrayed herself swept up in a passionate love affair, —"  
  
"She _was_ swept up in a passionate love affair!" John interjected.  
  
"— and even her word choice, the archaic choice of 'ken' instead of 'know,' for example, points at a dramatic flair in addition to a sharp intelligence." He paused for a moment, considering. "Suppose for a moment she _were_ some sort of operative, working with Mycroft's man, and that there is more to these letters than meets the eye. Her other, secret correspondent could have copied out the letters any time between her Thursday confession and the Sunday service. She would think of herself as a renegade in the cause of justice. If the letters were written to Mrs. Shuttleworth, but also meant for the eyes of Mr. Lear — which would explain why our copies are written out in his hand — then —" Sherlock closed his eyes, breathed deeply, and wheeled around, looking straight at Strachey, "— using what key would such a woman, in eighteen-forty, compose a code?"  
  
Strachey stared back at him. "What, do you mean which books would she like to read? She was meeting with a cleric; have you considered the Bible?"  
  
Sherlock waved this suggestion away. "Obvious. And dangerous, if she wanted Manning kept in the dark. No, it would be something with an edge, something a bit scandalous but probably well- known. Something she fancied revolutionary, political. It would have to be something she knew backward and forward, for such a complex cipher to be worth her while; she would have to be able to reach for words from memory and equate them with numbers. Which means...page numbers, or —"  
  
"Stanza numbers," said Strachey, excited. "It was the golden age of poetry memorisation. Shakespeare's sonnets, or Mrs. Hemans’s ballads, or —" Strachey's eyes went wide, and he rose from the chair as if on strings, skittering to the inn's bookshelves while muttering, "revolutionary...sexual deviant... backwards and forwards..." He began pulling weathered volumes from the shelves with controlled energy. Smirking, he then handed a hefty stack of them to John, who raised an eyebrow and passed them on again to Sherlock.  
  
"Lord Byron," announced Strachey magisterially to the silent room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Strachey's slight misquotation is from William Blake's 1794 poem "A Little Boy Lost" (from Songs of Experience).
> 
> 2\. Mrs. Nicholson here is Vita Sackville-West (recently married to Harold Nicholson), acquaintance of the Bloomsbury circle and lover of many women. Her most passionate and long-term love affair at this point was with Violet Keppel (married name Trefusis). A few years later Sackville-West would have an affair with Virginia Woolf and become the inspiration for Woolf's novel _Orlando_.
> 
> 3\. Christina Rossetti's poem "Goblin Market" was published in 1862. The passage Strachey is referring to is below. Incredibly, all the evidence suggests that Rossetti was not consciously aware of the insane levels of lesbian eroticism in this poem. Also worth your porny attention are the scenes when the sisters are interacting with the evil fruit-selling goblin men.
> 
>  
> 
> _She cried 'Laura,' up the garden,_  
>  'Did you miss me?  
> Come and kiss me.  
> Never mind my bruises,  
> Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices  
> Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,  
> Goblin pulp and goblin dew.  
> Eat me, drink me, love me;  
> Laura, make much of me:  
> For your sake I have braved the glen  
> And had to do with goblin merchant men.'


	7. Your shadow at morning, striding behind you

249 16.0OR WLV 233P JUNE 18 1920  
SEBASTIAN SPROTT, KINGS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE ENGLAND  
  
THINK I RECALL YOUVE FRIENDS IN CENSUS OFFICE QUERY PLS TRACE PARENTAGE GRAND PARENTAGE ETC CALDONIA SUMMERSON BORN DUBLIN C1900 MOTHER BRIDGET SUMMERSON NEE CASEY LAST LIVED SPITALFIELDS LONDON STOP  
  
HELPING OUT FRIEND EXCLNT STORY WILL TELL ALL UPON RETURN STOP HOPE ALL FORGIVEN STOP MAYNARD

 

***

 

Sherlock looked down at the volumes in his hands. As promised they were all thoroughly Byronic, and they were also alarmingly numerous. Strachey smirked as Sherlock shuffled through the tomes. _The Corsair_. _The Bride of Abydos_. _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_. _The Prisoner of Chillon_. _The Prophecy of Dante_. _The Seige of Corinth. The Lament of Tasso. Don Juan. Mazeppa._  
  
"Right," said Sherlock, turning on Strachey with the manic gleam still in his eyes. "Tell me why."  
  
Strachey hastily adjusted his expression from that of a triumphant adversary to one of a helpful librarian. "Well," he said, "in 1840 he was still wildly popular, and, you know, just exactly what you described. Flaunted his liberal notions, only took up his seat in the House of Lords to defend the rights of the working man. Died heroically on the battlefield of Greek independence and all that. Conducted wild love affairs. He was a tremendous heart-throb, well —" Strachey flipped open the frontispiece of _The Lament of Tasso_ and thumbed over a plate engraving sporting full mouth, open collar and black curls, "just look at the man."  
  
Sherlock craned his neck, grimaced. "A bit _pretty_ ," he said with distaste, and for some reason the room's other three occupants all burst out laughing.  
  
"Mr. Holmes," said Strachey, dabbing at his eyes, "your lack of irony is overwhelming."  
  
Sherlock, despite its unwieldiness, managed to brandish the large pile of books impatiently, rolling his eyes. "Bloody — finish what you've got to say."  
  
Strachey got himself together. "It would be a perfect mental resource for the kind of code you're suggesting. Any young lady of Miss Whitmore's generation would have been likely to have memorised vast swathes of these books in her fair youth, without anyone looking askance. Well," he corrected, scanning the pile, "huge swathes of most of them. Though, given Miss Whitmore's proclivities, we might want to start with _Don Juan_ after all."  
  
Sherlock gave a short nod, and was then suddenly sweeping around the room, distributing piles of books and issuing instructions. The hall of records was forgotten; the sitting room of the Black Horse was commandeered for the duration of the afternoon, and the four men settled in for a lengthy research session.  
  
Keynes made transcriptions of the numeric pairs that he and Sherlock had extracted from Charlotte Whitmore's letters the night before, and they all set about counting out the stanzas and words that corresponded to the first and second numbers. Since nearly all of the poems were divided into cantos, Sherlock insisted they look up fifteen words from each canto of each poem before moving on, making particular note of the words that corresponded with the repeated number combinations: 3 and 3, 26 and 8, 4 and 10.  
  
The room settled into the heavy stillness of mutual concentration. Only now and then was the quiet broken by the shuffling of a chair or snort of laughter.  
  
"Reach'd for," mumbled John at one point, working through the second canto of _The Bride of Abydos_. "That's hopeful, and then...'hath' — that — doesn't make much sense grammatically..." A long stretch of silence. Then, "Dammit. 'Reach'd for hath she a trophies none on for chase hath hath on hewn.' Jesus. Sounds like someone's hacking up a lung."  
  
"Log it anyway," intoned Sherlock absently from the corner desk, waving a hand. John reached for the shared Moleskine notebook just as Keynes was asking "Does 'thunder-like' count for one word or two, d'you think?"  
  
"Log...the results of both possibilities," said Sherlock in the same distracted monotone, scratching at his notepad.  
  
Strachey had appropriated _Don Juan_ and was working through its sixteen long cantos with undisguised relish, though John suspected that he was taking breaks simply to read the juicier sections. He kept chuckling to himself, anyway, and at one point muttered something that sounded like "and the gods adultery...where the climate's sultry." His enthusiasm picked up when Canto Six disclosed a near-coherent "Left a commonest gentleman and all widows," but deflated again when it petered out into "that a I et commonest that heroine." He then spent fifteen unproductive minutes counting the word and stanza combinations that would have resulted in a coded "concubine" or "catamite." Sadly, Miss Whitmore had included none of them.  
  
Hours in, John stretched and set aside The Corsair. Darkness was coalescing outside the window, Keynes had run out to the telegraph office on some errand for Sherlock, and plates of cold meats had, at some point, been set on the sideboard. John rose stiffly, rolling down his shirtsleeves against the night chill, and crossed to pick up _Childe Harold's Pilgrimage_ from the desk where Sherlock was engrossed in the transference of notes from poem to notebook.  
  
Among the many things that John was still avoiding were direct glances at, or thoughts of, Sherlock's hands. Somehow, however, he still knew their exact positions: one wrapped around the barrel of a cobalt fountain pen, the other splayed open across the mildewed yellow pages of _The Dream_ , holding it down against the table. John didn't look, did not look.  
  
But with Sherlock's attention absorbed, John allowed himself, as he leaned over to pick up the book, to look down at the nape of Sherlock's neck where it was curved over the notebook. The sight brought on hollowness, and a hint of the sparking pit.  
  
The dark curls collected, fluid, at the base of Sherlock's skull. They spilled over white-blue skin stretched tight over vertebrae, and although John Watson had never been poetically inclined, troubled sleep and four hours' enforced consumption of Spenserian stanzas had his mind churning with extravagant phrases. "Beauty, like the night," it offered. "All that's best of dark and bright." His hand was hovering, almost touching the dark wisps tracing two soft V’s down the back of Sherlock's neck where his curls parted. Fingertips so close he could feel the difference in proximity when Sherlock inhaled.  
  


  


John was about to draw the hand back, but just then Sherlock shifted and sat up. His loosened collar and then the soft skin of his nape collided with John's fingertips. Sherlock startled, looked around and up at John, who still stood stupidly with outstretched hand. And Sherlock looked, and kept looking. Eyes wide.

It was John who coughed, brusque, and clutched _Childe Harold_ as he retreated to his chair. The grey gaze followed him for seconds upon seconds, before Sherlock shook himself and bent back over his work. John opened the book and gazed down for several moments, unseeing, at the impassive dedication. “ _To Ianthe_ ” stared back up at him as his heart thudded, and gradually calmed.

Half an hour later Strachey, half-dozing in his armchair, snorted and started awake. John's low voice, equal parts exhaustion and excitement, was saying "Sherlock, come look at this."

Sherlock scrambled across to stand behind John, looking down over his shoulder. Canto Four of _Childe Harold_ was spread open on the table, and in the moleskin John had written:

"Saw Tasso on dreams of Rome and chains Tasso essentially silent on chains but will not destroy or fetter us In Tasso's mind Rome hath a rising claim on me"

Sherlock exhaled low and sweet, a barely voiced "ahhhh" next to John's ear, and John shivered and cursed himself. Sherlock reached over his shoulder to dot three periods into the notebook. Strachey wandered over, pushing fingers under spectacles to rub at his eyes, and leaned across to read. "Who's Tasso?" he asked. "I mean to say, apart from a mad Italian poet."

"It must," said Sherlock, scanning over the words again, "be a way of referring to Manning. We already know Miss Whitmore had convinced him that Rome, as she says, had 'a rising claim' on her."

John was suddenly exhausted. "So the letters were just another blind," he said, dully. "What was she actually up to, then?"

Sherlock shook his head, eyes still tracking back and forth over the text. "Getting close to Manning, sounding him on something. Working against him, or for him, or in some capacity which needed his help."

"Her use of 'Rome' is pretty plainly a reference to the Catholic Church," John said, "but what does she mean by 'chains'?"

Sherlock hummed. "Given that copies of these letters ended up in the hands of Cian Lear, I would lay odds on a reference to home rule for Ireland. In any case, Manning was key to Miss Whitmore's larger mission —" he bounded back to his desk, grabbed the stack of letters, "— on which, now that we know the key to the code, we're about to have a lot more information." His eyes were dancing. The three others sighed.

But Keynes and John went happily enough to knock on doors and search the guest rooms for any spare copies of _Childe Harold_ , while Strachey ordered tea and Sherlock set himself to decoding Charlotte Whitmore's second letter. One more copy of the book was found in an upstairs bedroom, so the other three traded off decoding duties, working from the late end of the pile while Sherlock made his way quickly and steadily through the early end, and another person made duplicate copies of all the decoded messages.

Two hours later, there were a neat list of entries in the moleskin notebook, with two more copies on loose paper lying next to them. Starting with Charlotte's first clandestine visit to Manning, they detailed her attempts, both to sound him on the subjects of Roman Catholic conversion and Irish home rule, and, surprisingly, to protect his reputation and chances of promotion, without his knowledge. The final letter, dated 20 August 1841, was longer than most, and referred to dangerous rumours of Manning's Catholic sympathies:

"Claim of Tasso's Roman complexion borne from afar and divides hearts of the commonwealth. Sheltered brawling in the village. We must demand firm praises to clear the air. I hope our friend is still amongst us."

"It sounds as though Charlotte Whitmore and her correspondent had some kind of powerful third party up their sleeves," said John. "Some sort of, I don't know, secret weapon."

"Well," said Strachey, "they may have done. If I'm remembering rightly, this would have been around the time of Julius Hare's intervention on Manning's behalf — though I can't be sure."

"You can't consult your own book?" sniped Sherlock, and Keynes sniggered. 

"Lytton never includes dates in his histories," he said. Strachey sniffed. 

"They just clutter up the page."

"In any case," Sherlock said, rolling his eyes, "it’s clear that Miss Whitmore and her correspondent, who based on these letter transcripts and his possession of them we can assume was Mr. Lear, were working to assure Manning's appointment as Archdeacon, and that they thought he would be more sympathetic than the opposition, to the plight of the Irish Catholic peasant."

"About which," said John, "they were absolutely correct." And Sherlock gave a surprised chuckle and a lingering secret smile, which John couldn't explain at all.

***

Slumped on his hotel bed, loosening his tie, John reflected that such a sedentary afternoon and evening should hardly leave him feeling this exhausted. His window gave onto an alley rather than the main street. He was staring blankly at the bricks of the building opposite, toying with his waistcoat buttons, when a knock sounded in the quiet. John cleared his throat and called out "Yes?" and the door opened to reveal Sherlock, standing against the doorjamb and running a hand through his hair.

"Holmes," said John, by way of invitation, rising to his feet by the bedside table. Sherlock slouched into the room looking everywhere except John and saying, "Yes, I, um, just wanted to see — see how you were," which was utterly transparent, thought John, given that Sherlock's casual enquiries after his state of mind were almost always entrées to disrupting it.

"I'm fine," he said, trying for firmness. "Fine."

"Look, I know that you —" Sherlock paused, tried again. "You hoped we wouldn't find anything. That the letters would be just —"

John cut him off, his smile tight. "I'm not a child, Holmes. You don't need to apologise for being proved right in the event."

"Ah. Good." Sherlock paused. "To tell the truth." He paused again, started pacing. "I was — I was talking with Keynes last night. About the letters."

"Oh yes?" said John, tracking Sherlock's nervous progress back and forth from desk to bed. "I supposed you must have done, since he's the one who pointed out the patterns of —"

But Sherlock was shaking his head. "This was before that. He — well. He doesn't think it's a question of — of mutually exclusive options. Of either or." He looked expectantly at John.

"Either or?"

Sherlock squirmed, huffed in impatience, looked away. " _Either_ spycraft or passion. That Miss Whitmore must have been either a — a devoted lover, or a heartless subversive agent. He — Keynes — he thinks she could have been genuinely passionate about both her political work and about Mrs. Summerson. As if —" he chewed his lip, brows drawn together, "- as if they were two halves of something, as if they — fed into one another, he said."

He glanced up. John stared back at him, backed against the head of the bed.

Sherlock looked back down at his hands, steepled in front of him, and sighed. "It pains me to admit that Keynes is extremely intelligent," he said, and scowled so hard that John burst out laughing.

"What, because of his insight into the character of Charlotte Whitmore?"

Sherlock fairly growled. "No, good grief Watson, haven't you been listening? Last night I did my utmost, my _utmost_ , to convince myself of the mediocrity of his mind. I laid every trap I could think of for him, and he escaped them easily. For over _three hours_ I pushed as hard as I could at his theories and logic and found them sound. And not only sound but — but _joyful_. The kind of joy I recognise, the kind I feel when I'm finally pulling together the facts of a problem that's kept me running for weeks."

John sagged back toward the headboard and ran his hands through his hair, weight braced against the wall. "Why are you telling me this?" he asked the floor. "You'd have better luck going straight to Keynes and," he waved one arm, tiredly, "declaring yourself."

"Declaring myself to _Keynes_?" Sherlock barked, and John suppressed a dry smile at the memory of Strachey reacting with almost exactly the same incredulity to a similar suggestion. Poor Keynes, John thought.

"For god's sake," said Sherlock, "I am decidedly not lusting after Maynard Keynes. But I do — I recognise myself in him, Watson. He has my sort of mind, the joy in patterns and deductions. And yet he — he runs drunk out into the corridor after Sebastian Sprott, and I —" he took a tentative step toward the headboard, where John was straightening up, "— and I thought I might see a similar sort of mind in those letters, in Miss Whitmore’s letters, but then I —" he took another step and was standing less than a foot from John, who still didn't move, "— I was sure it was all a show, that someone with her mind in her circumstances could never devote herself to — to those things, that they would ruin her, but then —" he took another step and John could feel warmth radiating off moonlit skin, "— then Keynes said that _he'd_ written letters like that, and maybe for Miss Whitmore the two things fed each other, and I thought —" he raised a hand to hover an inch from John's cheek and jaw, "— I thought that maybe it was all right, you were right, that Charlotte wrote passionate love letters because she was — she was —" he broke off, one hand almost cupping John's cheek and the other flexing and fisting by his side.

John was caught in a wash of vertigo. The pit of arcing, sparking coils yawned beneath him and he was so worn down by wanting, and the heat of Sherlock's beautiful hand was so close. There was confusion, uncertainty, dread, but his eyes slid shut regardless and the two men breathed each others' air, ragged and reaching. And then John turned his head and said, with his wet, warm breath into Sherlock's palm, "— because she was...?" and he bit down gently, so gently on Sherlock's thumb, and Sherlock _whined_.

Stormy eyes were locked on John's mouth, and then Sherlock was surging forward to lick and suck at the place his thumb was held between John's teeth, and he was panting "Will you let me? God, _please_ John, please let me, please just let me —" and John heard his Christian name and was lost; there was nothing for it but to step forward over the precipice, and he whispered "Jesus, Sherlock, yes."

And then Sherlock's lips and teeth were fastened to John's neck, sucking and biting, and his hands were everywhere in John's hair and across his chest as Sherlock moved around behind him, nipping at the soft flesh at the base of his jaw and the lobe of his ear and the curve of his neck into his shoulder.

Sherlock had one long arm across the front of John's shoulders and another clamped around his chest, fingers grappling into the flesh at his waist, and with both arms he was gripping John to his own chest, caging him as he bent his mouth to bite and suck at the back of John's neck, at the bone at his nape. He bit hard and John moaned and bucked against the vice of his arms. So Sherlock's mouth gentled, tonguing and suckling softly, so softly that flames were licking at John's feet and up his legs and something familiar was tugging at the back of his mind but then Sherlock bit down again, hard.

John swore and bucked and choked out "Sherlock, Christ, let me kiss you," and Sherlock gasped his surprised "Yes" like being kissed by John was something absolutely essential that he had somehow forgotten about until this very second, and loosened his grip to let John turn around in his arms.

Even in the moonlight and the low glow of the electric lamp, Sherlock's lips and his high cheekbones were flushed and his eyes were blazing and his whole body, crushed front-to-front with John's, was surging forward, hips pressing John into the edge of the bed, and he craned with parted lips toward John, but he did not, did not kiss him. John had a wild moment of near- laughter that Sherlock was taking John's pillow-talk so literally. Then he licked into Sherlock's open mouth and Sherlock moaned, sounding devastated, and John held himself back from snarling with triumph and need.

Because he wanted to savour this, touching Sherlock at last, and since Sherlock seemed set on ceding control of the kiss, John slowed it down. He licked at Sherlock's bottom lip, tasting it obsessively again and again with wet little presses of tongue, then sucking so lightly it trembled between his lips. He dipped his tongue into Sherlock's mouth and flicked the tip of it over Sherlock's bottom row of teeth, slightly crooked the way they always showed when he stood panting, lips parted, short of breath from having given chase. And Sherlock was panting now; his whole body was softening and near melting under the kisses, and John knew, he knew that Sherlock was half out of his mind with it, but —

"Harder," Sherlock said, with a little shake of his head. "Please John. Bite me, mark me, please."

John drew back, a little nonplussed — not because he didn’t want to, but because between Sherlock's body and his words there was something askew. He cradled Sherlock's head in his hands and shifted his gentle licking and suckling to his neck and jaw. Sherlock fairly purred with pleasure, and John said, between kisses, "It doesn't have to be that way. It's fine to want it soft," and Sherlock gave a little sob.

But then he said, with his voice edging into panic, "I just — I need you to, John, please, I need you to bite, just a little bit, please," and John bit down on the base of Sherlock's sharp jawline, next to his ear, and Sherlock sighed with something strangely like relief. So John dragged his mouth over Sherlock's earlobe, and bit at his lips, and when John's teeth grazed the edge of a cheekbone he heard again a sigh of "Yes..." very soft. John's heart was so full of Sherlock he thought there must not be room enough to hold it in all his sparking veins.

And then Sherlock was pushing John back, down onto the bed behind them and unfastening his buttons and clasps, peeling John's shirt from his shoulders and his trousers from his hips and John was drunk on being so lavishly touched by those long, pale hands, the real ones this time, scarred and calloused and perfect. Want was bubbling up in him, the need to take hold of palms and knuckles and the pads of Sherlock’s thumbs, to map them and kiss them and get those fingers in his mouth and _suck them down his fucking throat_ , but Sherlock had him stripped and laid out on the bed and was holding him down with one hand while Sherlock sank to his knees on the floor in front of John's splayed body and pulled John toward him by the legs. And then there was lapping warmth and wet and heat and —

"Oh god Sherlock, your _mouth_ ," John choked out, "your lovely goddamn mouth"

— and Sherlock moaned his approval as his lips wrapped around John's aching cock and he licked and sucked and pulled at him. For minutes together it was just that, Sherlock's hands on John's hips and his mouth pulling and pulling at him, and the pressure of a warm tongue pressed against the underside of his shaft. Sherlock was rocking his hips against the side of the bed like he was mad for it and John was staring at the spot where his cock was sliding through the spit- slick heart-shape of Sherlock's lips.

He was breathing hard and couldn’t close his eyes for anything; he was falling so fast that when Sherlock first drew his lips back, John welcomed the distraction of a nick of teeth. But then a nick was a catch and the next moment it was too much, Sherlock was almost biting down, and John jerked away and said "Too much — too much teeth, Sherlock," and something tugged again at the back of his mind, his own voice in a train compartment —

_She seems a bit fixated on using her teeth_

— but he couldn't think on it for long because Sherlock was grunting in dissatisfaction and hollowing his cheeks and sucking hard, sliding upward slowly again and again, and the tension was building in John's belly. Then Sherlock was leaning on his elbows and his hands were circling the root of John's prick where it met Sherlock's mouth. John cried out; those hands! Those hands.

The fingers were wet with thick saliva then and they thrust back, behind John's balls, one arm stretching to cradle and dig into the flesh of John's back, lifting him into an arch that forced him deeper into Sherlock's mouth. The other hand was circling and kneading around the ring of his entrance and then pressing in, pressing inside him in the same rhythm as his lips sliding over John's cock, and John was panting "God, yes, your hands, put your hands _inside me_ ," and Sherlock curled his fingers and pulled John hard into him and John was shaking apart, twisting in the coiling pit-black current, coming down Sherlock's throat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Huge thanks to [Dee](http://bachin221b.tumblr.com/) for the gorgeous art included in this chapter! It's stunning, Dee, I love it. You can see a larger version at her [Deviant Art page](http://draloreshimare.deviantart.com/art/Fingertips-So-Close-307879171).
> 
> 2\. "His lack of irony is overwhelming" is a phrase Strachey wrote in a letter to Leonard Woolf in April 1906, about a biography Strachey was reading.
> 
> 3\. The couplet from _Don Juan_ that Strachey chuckles at is:  
>  _What men call gallantry, and gods adultery,_  
>  Is much more common where the climate's sultry.
> 
> 4\. The Byronic lines that occur to John as he watches Sherlock's neck are from the 1814 poem  
> "She Walks in Beauty," which was published in 1815 as part of the collection _Hebrew Melodies_.
> 
> 5\. Torquato Tasso was a 16th-century Italian poet. Byron talks a lot about him in the fourth  
> canto of _Childe Harold_ because Tasso was associated with Venice, where the canto is set, and Byron's speaker is reflecting on that city's fallen glory. The Romantics (I am simplifying here) loved Tasso because he went mad, and they liked to think of madness and creative genius as inextricably linked.
> 
> 6\. I am venting my own frustration a wee bit re: Lytton Strachey never including dates in his books. It makes them hard to use for stringing together a mystery plot!


	8. My friend, blood shaking my heart

348 16.2 CA KIN 834A JUNE 19 1920  
JOHN MAYNARD KEYNES, BLACK HORSE INN, MIDHURST, WEST SUSSEX  
  
THINGS NEVER GET DULL AROUND YOU MAYNARD STOP  
  
CALDONIA SUMMERSONS PARENTS BRIDGET CASEY AND MICHAEL SUMMERSON STOP  
  
MATERNAL GRANDPARENTS SUSAN OHALLERAN AND PAUL CASEY STOP SUSANS PARENTS CALDONIA FLETCHER AND THOMAS OHALLERAN PAULS PARENTS BRIDGET KERR AND AIDAN CASEY STOP IN ORDER AS PROGENY ARE LISTED GREAT GRANDPARENTS ARE IANTHE SHANNON AND BRENDAN FLETCHER, BREDA BYRNE AND BRYAN OHALLERAN, DIANA SOMERS AND DERMOT KERR, KATHLEEN MARTIN AND SEAMUS CASEY STOP  
  
PATERNAL GRANDPARENTS EILEEN CONNOLLY AND SEAN SUMMERSON STOP EILEENS PARENTS CAITLIN FITZGERALD AND DERMOT CONNOLLY SEANS PARENTS KEIRA CLARKE AND SEAN SUMMERSON SR STOP IN ORDER AS PROGENY ARE LISTED GREAT GRANDPARENTS ARE LINDSAY ODWYER AND MARTIN FITZGERALD, MAURA TURNER AND BRYAN CONNOLLY, NORA DEVLIN AND PATRICK CLARKE, ROSE BUTLER AND MICHAEL SUMMERSON STOP  
  
HOPE TO SEE YOU SOON STOP EXPECT REIMBURSEMENT FOR THIS RIDICULOUS WIRE STOP ALL FORGIVEN STOP SEBASTIAN

 

***

 

John drifted back to himself, panting and liquid, to ﬁnd Sherlock on his side, head pillowed with his ear against John's chest. Sherlock’s body was curled into itself, and he was breathing in mufﬂed gasps, making tiny, desperate noises under his  breath. John smiled and twisted in his arms, kissing deep and lazy, fumbling at the ﬂies of Sherlock's trousers. One hand was ﬂexing against Sherlock's chest under his rucked-up shirt, and the other was freeing and then curling around Sherlock's cock, which was blood-hot and leaking and near-pulsing in John's grip, and it took seconds upon blissful seconds before John realized that the movements Sherlock was making were attempts at pushing him away.  
  
"God, stop, John, I'm — I'll ﬁnish in seconds if you don't stop touching me," Sherlock said, and John hummed.  
  
"That's the idea," he murmured, stroking again, but Sherlock was up and off the bed, still gasping breaths and holding himself up with difﬁculty against the side-table, eyes shut tight as if in pain. John frowned, drew back. "You don't want to?" he asked, quiet for a moment, but he saw Sherlock's cock jump untouched at the sound of his voice.  
  
"It's not that, it's just — it's not in the pl — I'm not sure it's all _right_ ,” groaned Sherlock, sounding near to panic, and as John's brain cleared, several scattered points of uneasy recognition began to coalesce. Everything Sherlock had wanted, everything he had done — it had been familiar. John had, he realised, _read it all before_.  
  
He felt ill.  
  
_my ﬁngers digging in the dip above your hip through your ﬁne light cottons, of tasting and tasting that bone at your back_  
  
…and Sherlock had dug into John’s hip, had bitten at John’s nape. "Not in the plan, right. You somehow — you had this all planned out, did you?" John asked, in a dead voice. Charlotte Whitmore's words were beating at him.  
  
_Thrusting your hips into my pressing teeth and tongue, your bowstringed spine and your shaking limbs_  
  
…and that would explain the teeth. "What was this, Holmes? Some experiment? Some reenactment of dear Miss Whitmore's letters? Trying to determine the feasibility of her scenarios? Jesus. Is that why you needed to correct me, when I was kissing you? So I would do exactly what she wrote, be rough like she was, even though it wasn't what you really wanted?" He laughed, dry and bitter. Sherlock was shaking his head, a look of horror on his face.  
  
_It's made of your soft cries and your turning, your biting and breathing and scraping teeth and lips against my cheekbones and my mouth_  
  
…the kissing. The moment of initiative Sherlock had given up: John had thought Sherlock was listening to him. He had been aping Charlotte Whitmore, instead.  
  
"You should have listened to Keynes,” John went on, “tracked down a woman to try it all out on. Better yet, tracked down a couple of whores you could pay to act it out for you. What was I, Holmes? A stand-in for a Victorian fucking _matron_?"  
  
_one hand digging into your slippery back and the other pushing inside you_  
  
…every motion of those lovely hands on his skin. Had Sherlock wanted any of it?  
  
John was starting to shake on the bed, his teeth clicking together, and Sherlock ﬁnally came out of his shock to say "No. John, it wasn't like that, I was —" He sat on the bed and John shuddered away from him. "I wanted you _brutally_ , John. Want you." Holding his head in his hands.  
  
_Even in the long languid minutes after, when I stretch against you with my ear against your breast…_  
  
"Yes? Interferes with the results of your experiment, then, does it?"  
  
" _No_ ," snapped Sherlock, hands in his hair, "I just — I never thought I could have this, any of this, John. I always thought — it was either one life or the other, it would be too distracting, and what would I amount to without the life of the mind? But then — Keynes and Miss Whitmore managed it both ways and I thought — god, John, you don't know how I wanted that, seeing you like that because of me. And I thought it might be — safe. If it was just for you."  
  
_How shall I walk the village streets, love, with such a beast in my breast_  
  
John was shaking so hard he could barely stand, but he pulled his trousers on, got off the bed and faced Sherlock across the room. Here he was, his mind repeated numbly. The bottom of the pit, where the wheel was spinning: rage, desire, grief. "You think," he said, "that allowing yourself pleasure with me would destroy your 'life of the mind.'" It wasn’t a question.  
  
"I — am afraid. Of that."  
  
The wheel clicked down to stop on the red, and rage exploded behind John's eyes. He was crowding up in front of Sherlock and speaking, low and poisonous, into his face. "You bastard. Two days ago I as good as told you that my last lover —"  
  
"Strachey," murmured Sherlock, unable to stop himself, and John spat,  
  
"The last person I fucking loved, Holmes, went mad in front of me and I was powerless to help him. You just thought you would play with me a bit, did you, then tell me you won't let me touch you because you're afraid of going the same way as Daniel? How do you think that makes me feel, Holmes? _Contagious_?"  
  
Sherlock looked ravaged. "I didn't think — you're not — you're —" he said, and stopped. John breathed hard in his face for a count of seconds, his hand twitching as if about to to punch, and then he turned and jerked his shirt off the bed.  
  
"I’m going," he said, snatching his billfold from the side table and slamming out of the room.

 

***

 

Three hours later, just before the first faint glimmers of dawn, Sherlock knocked on a door, then knocked on it again. He’d knocked on it a fourth time before it opened to reveal Keynes, in a green dressing gown, looking severely put-upon.  
  
“Mr. Holmes,” he said, and Sherlock could see his face trying to resolve into an expression that never quite materialised. “What in the hell are you doing here?”  
  
Sherlock swallowed. “I need — I need a favour, Keynes.”  
  
“Ah. And it couldn’t wait until the morning, I take it.”  
  
“Er — no,” said Sherlock.  
  
Keynes leaned his hip on the doorjamb but did not invite Sherlock in: half an invitation.  
  
“It’s about Watson,” Sherlock said in a rush, before he could stop himself. “I’ve made a — a drastic mistake. And he won’t see me right now, but I’ve seen his look before, Keynes, and it’s — he needs someone with him.”  
  
Keynes ground his knuckles into his eye sockets. “Is he in his room?” he asked.  
  
Sherlock winced. “No,” he said, “I think he’s at the train station. I think he’s getting the first train back to London.” He was speaking to a place somewhere between Keynes’s chin and his collarbone.  
  
Keynes scrutinised Sherlock closely for several seconds. “What about Lytton?” he asked, and Sherlock drew in a breath, looked up at the ceiling and blinked hard.  
  
“If you can’t go,” he said, carefully, his voice nearly steady, “I will, of course, ask Mr. Strachey instead.” And he continued blinking up at the ceiling.  
  
Keynes kept staring for a moment, and then his features softened. “I’ll be out there in half an hour,” he said, and shut the door in Sherlock’s face.

 

***

 

Strachey, making his way downstairs late the next morning, was dismayed to find Sherlock alone in the drawing room, hunched over the dining table and scowling at an egg cup. “Maynard and Dr. Watson,” Strachey said, pulling up a chair and reaching for the teapot, “are they off on a walk somewhere?”  
  
“Possibly,” Sherlock said to the egg cup. After a few moments of silence, he sighed and wrenched his gaze up toward Strachey’s face. “London is ‘somewhere,’ is it not?”  
  
“Dr. Watson and Maynard — are in London?” asked Strachey, bewildered. “But, last night — Maynard never said anything. He only said he’d better get to bed and that he was excited to see what happened next. In the —” he waved his hand vaguely over his teacup, “— investigation.” Teacup to lips, his expression vague and inquiring.  
  
“Yes,” said Sherlock. “Well, what happened next is that I woke him at three in the morning to accompany Watson back to London.”  
  
Strachey choked on his Assam. “You —” he sputtered, “— you sent John Watson back to London? With _Maynard Keynes_? When Maynard knows that John and I —” he stopped, colouring up.  
  
“I didn’t send _Watson_ anywhere,” spat Sherlock. “Don’t be an idiot.” His gaze faltered, and he looked down at the egg cup again. “Someone had to go with him, and it couldn’t be me. So.”  
  
Strachey’s face was attempting to express consternation, amusement, and incredulity all at once. “You couldn’t have simply returned here in a few days? Is your infatuation with this eighty-year-old mystery really such a priority, Mr. Holmes?”  
  
“No,” said Sherlock levelly, and volunteered no more information. _A night with Strachey_ , his mind supplied, _didn’t send John running back to London._  
  
“What then? Was the man drunk, or injured, that he needed a chaperone?”  
  
“No,” said Sherlock again. _The day after no kissing behind Strachey’s bedroom door, John had been laughing over poetry in this very room. John. Laughing John._ Sherlock forced himself to hold his impassive stare level across the table until Strachey looked away.  
  
“Good lord,” said Strachey, looking down at the table and fiddling with his teacup. “He’ll have evened our score by the time the train arrived in Victoria.” Sherlock’s glare turned icy, and Strachey scrambled to put the conversation back on even ground. “Well. What next, then? The august West Lavington hall of records?”

 

***

 

The West Lavington records hall was actually more of a shed, and a musty one at that, tucked back into a hollow next to the town’s tiny library. What’s more, it didn’t open until noon on Sundays; Sherlock and Strachey’s late start had them arriving just as the sleepy-looking clerk was unlocking for the day. The clerk looked surprised to see any patrons rushing to sample his mouldering wares; he smiled in recognition, however, when he saw Strachey. The man was, Sherlock reflected, difficult to forget. John probably — but here he cut off his train of thought.  
  
“More research on Cardinal Manning?” the clerk asked, as he led the pair of men back through the labyrinth of records toward the shed’s back wall. Sherlock noted, piled haphazardly on shelves and sometimes directly on the floor, dusty folio ledgers and bundles of cross-written letters; mouldering octavo journals and leather-bound registers from long-forgotten village societies. The average age of the artifacts increased as the party made its way back. “Thought you’d said you were through with him,” continued the clerk to Strachey, “and good riddance.”  
  
They stopped near a corner table sandwiched between a bowed set of bookshelves and a tottering pile of packing crates, both brimming with documents. Sherlock, making himself at home, gravitated toward the records of the 1830s, and was soon riffling through papers and extracting tomes. “I _did_ say that,” mused Strachey, leaning up against the bookcase with his walking stick dangling jauntily from the crook of his arm. Looking askance at the packing crates Sherlock was now manhandling up onto the table, he added, under his breath, “Would that it were true.”  
  
But despite Sherlock’s irritability and his own complaints, Strachey’s experience with the archive made him a valuable research aide. It soon became apparent that nothing remained of Miss Whitmore’s Henfield relations: unsurprising, thought Sherlock, for a simple shopkeeper and his wife, seventy years in the ground. Of Archdeacon Julius Hare, late of Chichester, a few artifacts did survive: assorted letters from extended family in Weimar and from former dons of Hare’s from Trinity; and a thick, leather-bound ledger in which Hare had recorded his household expenditures. Sherlock fell upon the book, began paging through. Strachey looked ill.  
  
“Surely,” he said, holding out the Trinity letters by the very tips of his fingers, “you don’t expect me to tackle any more of this religious claptrap than I’ve already suffered through with Manning.” Sherlock said nothing. “Come on, man,” said Strachey, “I’ll take the ledger, and you can —“ he gestured vaguely, still holding the letters, “battle onward with the Christian soldiers, here.”  
  
Sherlock grunted. “The letters are most likely immaterial,” he murmured. “Don’t read them, if you prefer not to.” Strachey threw up his hands, opening the first of the letters after all, and Sherlock returned to the ledger.  
  
Hare’s entries began in 1834, soon after he had relocated to Midhurst. At first, they were simple records of incomings and outgoings, with perhaps a short note to remind Hare of his purchases. By early 1835, the notes had grown in scope: they now appeared next to every expense, and many — ”serving platter necessary for entertaining the Bishop,” for example, or “chimney had gone 10 yrs without professional cleaning” — took on a defensive air. Sherlock mused, paging forward into 1836, that Hare’s frugality had a touch of the obsessive.  
  
Indeed, by midway through 1837 the normal ledger format had been abandoned completely, in favour of long, argumentative essays justifying nearly every coin that left the house. Despite his own preoccupation, Sherlock found himself fascinated by the psychology of the document. Hare was at war with his own frugality, and using the tools of his trade — preaching, persuasion — against himself, merely to keep up a normal standard of life. It didn’t take the world’s only consulting detective, Sherlock thought, to recognise an Achilles’ Heel like that.  
  
Strachey made a disgusted noise at this point, pushing the bundle of Trinity letters from him. “Matrimony and benedictions, how utterly monstrous,” he muttered. “Or perhaps only…Christian.” He got up from his chair, moving distractedly about the room.  
  
Sherlock’s concentration faltered a moment; he recognised the tone in which Strachey had said “Christian.” It was the one he himself usually used for “dull.” He hid the slight quirk of his lips, and directed his attention back to the ledger.  
  
In late 1838, he noted, the entries changed again. Hare took on a house steward: a decision which, in itself, required six folio pages of densely-packed argument for Hare to justify. The man in question, Michael Boyd, was an Irish Protestant, oppressed both on his home soil and here in England. Though intelligent and capable, he had fallen on hard times and taken to drowning his sorrows in drink, that vice to which (wrote Hare) his race were so particularly prone. It was, Hare argued to himself, his duty as a man and a clergyman to save Boyd from himself, by taking him into his house, and bestowing upon him steady work and a decent wage. Thereon followed several dense pages of Biblical precedent for this decision; Sherlock paged past it to the entries later in the month, and noticed Strachey fidgeting behind him.  
  
Strachey had come to gaze over Sherlock’s shoulder, fidgeting restlessly. “I was under the impression,” snapped Sherlock  over his shoulder, “that you were familiar with the process of conducting research.”  
  
“I just don’t see what possible relevance this —“ he waved his hand, “— this wayward Irishman might have to, to your vanished chambermaid, or the cargo of the HMS Derbyshire, or any of it.”  
  
Sherlock startled in his chair and said, the words unfamiliar in his mouth, “How did you —“ but Strachey waved a hand again. The gesture was beginning to madden Sherlock.  
  
“Maynard said something about — about tea, was it? And a ship leaving port tomorrow? Well I mean to say, shouldn’t you be —“ but he left off at seeing the dangerous glint in Sherlock’s eyes.  
  
“Apparently Keynes,” growled Sherlock, “is brilliant indeed. Perhaps he’ll occupy the rest of this afternoon explaining the situation to _Watson_.” Which was enough to shut Strachey’s mouth again, to Sherlock’s grim satisfaction. He bent his mind back to Hare’s ledger, with Strachey leaning hesitantly over his shoulder.  
  
As house steward, then, Boyd was necessarily included in the discussions of household finance, and his influence was immediately apparent in the ledger entries. There were, at first, typically lengthy summaries of discussions and arguments between Boyd and Hare on the subject of outgoing cash: was a new harness for the horse truly necessary? How much was proper to contribute to the maintenance of poor Widow Harrison? Over the course of six months, however, the entries shrank drastically, so that by late 1839 Hare was noting merely, “Boyd confirmed necessity” after most purchases. It was as if, thought Sherlock with interest, the house steward had become a kind of projection of Hare’s own compulsive frugality; if Boyd said a thing was justified, Hare felt the weight of responsibility lift off his own shoulders.  
  
Strachey actually chuckled when Sherlock turned another page. “Getting a bit above himself, isn’t he?” he said, pointing to a line where Hare had written, “Gift to charity. Boyd corrected my last Sunday’s sermon on the Irish Problem; approved the choice of this almshouse as reparation.” Boyd’s influence with his employer, it seemed, was spreading beyond the bounds of cash dealings.  
  
Sherlock made a noncommittal noise in Strachey’s direction. He had his suspicions (Mycroft’s documents had implied a residency in the area starting around 1838), but he was looking for confirmation in the shape of one particular name, and in February of 1840 he found it. “Questioned the wisdom of Manning’s appointment in conversation with Boyd,” Hare had written, as an addendum to an entry on the purchase of church candlesticks. “He became melancholic, but would not be drawn out on the subject. Much to think on.”  
  
Strachey narrowed his eyes down at the top of Sherlock’s head. “Cian Lear,” he mused, and then, more excitedly, “You think Mr. Boyd was actually Cian Lear, don’t you? Working with Miss Whitmore to protect the glory of Manning’s name?” And Sherlock, snippy at being anticipated, said “Indeed I do,” and continued paging forward, not looking up.  
  
Strachey sighed.

 

***

 

Half an hour later, into the midst of an awkward silence, broke the scraping of hinges near the shed’s entrance and a crack of sunshine across the dusty floor. Soft shuffling sounded over the wooden boards, and soon a gangly young woman came into view, a girl really, her hair in two messy mouse-brown plaits. Her elbows stuck out and her skirts were still above the ankle; she clutched a telegram envelope in one hand.  
  
“Miss Pringle,” Strachey said, smiling, getting to his feet. Sherlock glanced up, then back at Hare’s register.  
  
“Mr. Terence at the Black Dog,” mumbled the girl, shuffling her feet, “he said Mr. Keynes was here with you and two other gentlemen, and since I’d always seen you here — and the clerk Mr. Wilson is gone to lunch —“ she trailed off, holding out the envelope without meeting Strachey’s eyes. He took it from her and handed it back to Sherlock, who hesitated only a moment over the question of opening a telegram addressed to someone else. But it had been he, after all, who had asked Keynes to write to Sprott in the first place. His eyes raced over the text, and he began muttering “Breda…Diana…Kathleen,” under his breath.  
  
“And how is your painting coming?” asked Strachey, rummaging in his waistcoat for a coin.  
  
Miss Pringle flushed, and looked down at her shuffling feet. “It’s — er — it’s coming along, yes, thank you,” she said, and Strachey made a humming noise as he handed her the coin.  
  
“Shall I give Carrington your regards?” he asked, and the girl inhaled sharply, still not looking at him, and then nodded rapidly, many times in succession, before fairly racing from the shed.  
  
Strachey chuckled, and sat back down. “She came for a visit when I was down here before,” he explained to Sherlock, who was still absorbed in the telegram. “Carrington, that is, my — friend. The woman with whom I live.” He gave a slight cough. “Carrington is a painter. I seem to be — hm — I seem to be incorrigible when it comes to painters. I believe young Miss Pringle was rather enamoured of her.”  
  
Sherlock gave a noncommittal noise, and said vaguely, “You needn’t keep me up to date on every half-wit who —“ but then his eyes snapped up, briefly diverted. “I thought you lived with Partridge?” he asked.  
  
Strachey hummed. “Yes,” he agreed. “We do.”  
  
Sherlock’s eyebrows rose briefly; then he shrugged. Strachey’s domestic arrangements, while unconventional, were of no particular relevance. Not to mention that there was something — some source of interest in the telegram, which was stirring at the back of his mind. _Lindsay…Maura…Ianthe…_ There was something there he recognised, if he could only bring it to the surface.  
      
He blurred his mental focus, intentionally looking away from the memory, so as to lure it closer. What was it? _Rose…Kathleen…Ianthe…_ Sherlock’s mind was like a vast pool of water, with a tiny gold fish shimmering in its depths. _Breda…Ianthe_ … What was he remembering? He’d seen it in print. The golden gleam swam closer, teasing him, darting away when he looked at it directly. Sometime in the last few days…mentally he reached behind him into the water, and felt the brush of golden scales. _Ianthe_ …  
  
And then he saw it: his own fingers reaching to take a book from John’s outstretched hand; the volume falling open to the dedication page. _To Ianthe_. He opened his eyes and the musty shed was transformed, electric with the aura of discovery.  
  
“It’s _Childe Harold_!” he exclaimed, brandishing the telegram. “The dedication, I knew I’d seen it somewhere before. She was Callie Summerson’s great- _grand_ mother.”  
  
“Pardon?” said Strachey, who had not read the telegram and who would be, thought Sherlock in exasperation, equally lost even if he had.  
  
Sherlock was rummaging now in the satchel he had brought with him from the hotel. “Miss Summerson’s great-grandmother,” he said, continuing to search, “was named Ianthe Shannon. What sort of Irish name is Ianthe? It’s not, it’s Greek.  
  
“Oh, you say, no mystery there, no reason she couldn’t have had a Greek great-grandmother,” he was throwing things out of the bag now, his head tipped to the side, radiating irony, “no reason she couldn’t have emigrated to Dublin, despite how _unusual_ such a route of migration would have been at the time. No reason said Greek great-grandmother couldn’t have married an Irish man and had a daughter named Caldonia, despite that being a Scottish name usually spelled with an ‘e.’ No reason it _had_ to have been a reference to another Caldonia-without-an-e whom she may or may not have known earlier in her life, certainly it could all be a _coincidence_ —“ and here he extracted, at last, the volume he had been looking for, “— but it would be a remarkably _large_ one, given that the name Ianthe also shows up on the dedication page of _this_ book.” The last, hard consonant was emphasised heavily as Sherlock waved the Byron in Strachey’s direction.  
  
Strachey gaped, tried to keep up. “Charlotte Whitmore — you think she ran away to Ireland?”  
  
“Yes, yes,” Sherlock said, pacing, with a manic gleam. “She ran away, just after conspiring to protect Manning’s reputation. Her cover must have been compromised, somehow. Of course she would go to Ireland, her sympathies were obviously there if she was working with Cian Lear. And she took another name. Well of course, she would have needed to. But the name she _took_. A constant reminder of the time she spent in West Lavington, of using this poem to encode her love letters to Mrs. Shuttleworth.”  
  
“And she — she must have married,” said Strachey, taking up the telegram himself and staring at it.  
  
“Married, yes,” said Sherlock, “and had at least one daughter, named for Caldonia Shuttleworth. Meaning a year after her flight, at the minimum, Mrs. Shuttleworth was still very much in her mind. And she expected —“ Sherlock faltered, “she expected her to be so — indefinitely.”  
  
And just as suddenly as it had come, the electric atmosphere was gone from the records shed. It was, again, musty and decayed, and dappled only slightly by mid-afternoon June sunshine. _John_. Sherlock’s gut twisted with an odd mixture of guilt and defiance at the thought that he had, for a moment, forgotten.  
  
Strachey was regarding him with an oddly soft expression. “She must not have been such a harpy after all,” he said, slowly. “Caldonia Shuttleworth. Not when she inspired that kind of love.”  
  
Sherlock said nothing, so Strachey continued, looking down at his tweed-covered knees, “Or maybe — maybe she only became so after Miss Whitmore left. Losing a lover can do that, change one’s perspective. One’s behaviour.”  
  
Sherlock’s stomach was churning. “Are you attempting to imply something about — about me and —“  
  
Strachey looked up sharply. “Dr. Watson’s affections were never in question,” he said, and almost before he had finished speaking, Sherlock spat, “You didn’t have too much trouble _distracting him_.”  
  
Strachey drew himself up. “Mr. Holmes,” he said, in his most collected tone, “gentlemen don’t kiss and tell, and I am —“ he paused, smiled to himself slightly, “I am apparently enough of a gentleman for the rules to apply in this case. However, I feel duty-bound to tell you that I did _not_ lure John Watson into my bed by _distracting_ him from _you_.” Sherlock gaped. “Quite the reverse, in fact,” Strachey added, low and slightly sad.  
  
Sherlock licked his lips, summoning language. “And is there — is there anything else you’d like to —“  
  
“No,” Strachey cut in, suddenly firm. “But look here, I’ve set up house with a woman who is dead in love with me, and a man I’m dead in love with, who lusts after her in turn. If there is one subject on which I can speak with authority, it is misdirected love. And I can tell you, that is _not_ the case with you and Dr. Watson.”  Sherlock just stared, and Strachey sighed. “The man is _ill_ with love for you, Mr. Holmes.”  
  
The shed swam out of focus, and Sherlock’s heart was trying to escape his chest cavity. John had said so, hadn’t he? _The last person I fucking loved, Holmes_. He had said so, after everything, and Sherlock had cooly informed him that he wanted to remain safe, unaffected. Sherlock had only thought — Sherlock had only —  
  
Strachey, alarmed, rose to support Sherlock as he clutched at the table, head spinning with hard, quick breaths.  
  
“Mr. Holmes,” said Strachey, clutching Sherlock’s arm, “go back to London. No, listen,” he interrupted, as Sherlock tried to protest, “we have the strong suspicion that this Mr. Boyd was actually Cian Lear, correct? I think the least I can do for you and Dr. Watson is to remain in this unsullied remnant of Merrie Olde England and dig up anything more I can on Hare and Boyd, while you hie yourself back to London in Maynard’s place.”  
  
Sherlock, for once, was at a loss. He looked at Strachey, opened his mouth, waited for sound that did not come. He closed his mouth and continued to stare until Strachey, who had reassembled the contents of Sherlock’s satchel, thrust the bag into his waiting hand and propelled him toward the door with a firm pat on the back. Sherlock paused, looked back at Strachey, and then, with a nod and a brief hand to Strachey’s shoulder, gripped his bag and strode out of the shed toward the train station.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. While Julius Hare was a real person and an Anglican Archdeacon, nearly everything I write about him in this chapter is fictional.
> 
> 2\. Strachey’s comment about matrimony and benedictions being “monstrous, or perhaps only Christian” comes from a letter to Leonard Woolf from 20 March 1904.
> 
> 3\. Dora Carrington was a real person and a painter. She, Lytton Strachey and Ralph Partridge lived together for many years, and my understanding is that their dynamic was largely as described here. In 1921 Carrington married Partridge to keep their household together, rather than because she loved him. Tragically, when Strachey died in 1932, Carrington killed herself shortly thereafter.


	9. Your shadow at evening rising to meet you

249 16.0 OR WLV 406P JUNE 19 1920  
JOHN WATSON, 221B BAKER STREET, LONDON, ENGLAND

RETURNING TO LONDON STOP IF TELEGRAM ARRIVES FROM BILLY DO NOT REPEAT PLEASE DO NOT PURSUE ANY LEADS BEFORE I ARRIVE STOP WILL EXPLAIN EVERYTHING PLEASE JOHN STOP HOLMES

 

***

 

Earlier that day, in the sickly pale light of the Sussex dawn, John had huddled into the sense memory of other trains. He let them accumulate, building to a dull ache behind his eyes. They throbbed and pulsed there, moving forward and back. If they massed together, he thought, he would not have to look at any one train in particular. He would stand against this thing, not looking. Not directly.

Not at the platform full of laughing uniforms, young and whole with their card games and their nervous banter as they awaited the troop transport that would take them to Le Havre.

Not at the chilly November platform near Oise, where John had hugged his wool coat tighter around his shoulders as he waited to depart on his first leave, one hand holding a burning cigarette and the other fondling the folded sketch in his pocket, itching to take it out and look.

Not at the agitation of his younger self on a warm May morning after his third leave, leaning out the window of a carriage full of troops as it screeched into Arras station, scanning the waiting crowd for a dark, sleek head, though logically he knew that Daniel would not be allowed to leave the front.

Not at the third-class carriage, also glutted with olive drab, in which he had sheltered a panicked Daniel from the prying eyes of the other soldiers, as the train sped toward Amiens and Daniel ranted and accused him, and called out for John, for the man sitting right before him.

Not, either (though he did look, he couldn’t help it) at the spectre of Sherlock in that final car, standing off to the side, cooly observing the mess of Daniel’s madness, the fruits of an extended liaison with John. Sherlock, shaking his immaculate coiffed head, counting himself lucky to have made a clean escape. John clenched his fists in outraged protectiveness toward his past lover, and helpless longing for his last.

He would stand against them all, he thought, not looking.

He sensed a black-suited figure slide onto the bench next to him. He didn’t respond; he knew it wasn’t Sherlock. A gloved hand reached out for his upper arm, hovered a moment, then withdrew.

“Doctor Watson,” said Keynes, a neutral greeting between acquaintances. “We meet again. I regret to say I was dragged from a sound slumber just now, by an urgent telephone call ordering me back to London. Rum way to greet the day, I can tell you.”

John’s mind snagged for a moment, away from the drone of trains.

Keynes made no comment on either John’s silence or his presence on the platform, but kept up his cheerfully neutral patter. “I sometimes despair of my household ever running smoothly,” he said. “One day this spring, I came home from Charleston, looking forward to a glass of claret and the paper, only to find my cook locked in a passionate clinch with the neighborhood greengrocer, and my friend Mary upstairs in a similar embrace with Vanessa’s husband Clive. Not the peaceful homecoming I was anticipating, to be honest.”

John’s brain clicked...over...slowly. The trains’ drone seemed at some remove, now.

“A _no_ ther time — do you know Alix Sargent-Florence? Dreadful woman, involved with one of Lytton’s brothers — well, I came home to utter pandemonium, WCs out of order, servants in mutiny; I fled to my own bedroom to get away from it all and found Bunny Garnett sleeping in my bed, and to top it all off was Alix, rampaging about the place and talking of staying a month. I ask you.”

The station coalesced a bit before John’s eyes. He cleared his throat and was startled by the normality of the sound.  “And — and this time?” he said, eyes still forward.

“Ah, _this_ time,” said Keynes, reaching around and lifting a black bundle, which he laid in John’s lap. It was John’s coat, taken from his room at the inn. Keynes had, John realised dimly, expected to find him here.

“ _This_ time, well,” Keynes went on blithely. “My friends never go into detail over the telephone, you see. I’ll know soon enough, goes their logic; they may as well save themselves the expense. We shall see. I expect another pipe has ruptured, and no one in the house at the moment will take the initiative to call a plumber.”

John shrugged his numb hands through the black wool arms of his coat, and hugged it around him. His teeth stopped chattering quite so much.

“Or perhaps,” went on Keynes, “Vanessa’s up and left home for a month again without giving out any instruction for the servants. Then Clive will be home and no beds made up, no dinner on the table. Vanessa always was useless with servants — though not as bad as her sister, thankfully.”

His breathing almost normal again, John turned his head toward Keynes, who was peering down the platform in the other direction.

“Ah, here we are,” Keynes said, standing up and extending a hand to John. It was dry and gloved and utterly normal. “This, I believe, is our train.”

 

***

 

That evening in the train, retracing John and Keynes's earlier route, Sherlock cursed every idyllic hamlet and back-country station that slowed his progress. He cursed himself; he cursed the friendly amoral rivalry of Strachey and Keynes; he cursed the unaccustomed disorder in his own mind.

A day ago, obsessed as he had been with the idea of the sexual loophole by which Charlotte Whitmore and Maynard Keynes could love without losing the sharpness of their minds — a day ago, his interest in this business of Miss Whitmore’s new name would have been, he imagined, overwhelming. Here was compelling evidence that John had been right, that Keynes had been right. That Miss Whitmore’s feelings for her lover had been strong enough, and lasting enough, that she had lived out the rest of her life with a name that would remind her every day of her time with Mrs. Shuttleworth: of her love, and also her betrayal of her.

The endless hedgerows parted for another deserted village station, and the train slowed in a cacophony of screeching brakes. Questions stirred at the back of Sherlock’s  mind, and he wondered at their lack of urgency: was the name _Ianthe_ a penance Miss Whitmore had taken on herself, or more of a tribute to her lost lover? Dully, he knew there must exist some further evidence of the workings of Charlotte Whitmore’s mind: Callie Summerson had made use of her great-grandmother’s church hiding place; she must have learned about it somehow. The existence of an additional letter or confession was highly likely; and, given that it had been nowhere in her house, it was likely still in Miss Summerson’s possession. The Sherlock of the day before, he knew, would have been ecstatic at such a realisation; by his former logic, either penance or tribute would have meant permission to stop holding back with John.

Today, though, it all seemed oddly secondary, oddly petty. Secondary to the memory of John’s open, furious face; to his mouth, kiss-swollen, hissing that he’d loved Sherlock and that Sherlock had hurt him. Secondary to the ache of John’s suggestion that Sherlock thought him contagious, contaminated; that John thought Sherlock blamed him for the madness of his former lover. Secondary to Sherlock’s own disgust at having missed such an obvious contingency. John had kept the knowledge of Daniel to himself for a solid year; why had Sherlock not considered all the possible reasons for such an omission? Had this been a murder investigation, he thought, he would never have leaped into action without considering the motivations of all parties concerned. The train sped past unbearable brick cottages, infuriating flocks of sheep. He fumbled with his case and lit a cigarette, exhaling viciously.

Meanwhile, according to all expectations borne of personal history, Sherlock should not be thinking about John at all, but about the investigation currently underway. His focus on a case was generally absolute: particularly when, as now, the threads were converging so nicely into a cohesive fabric. The net was closing on Miss Summerson and her associates; Billy’s telegram could arrive at Baker Street any minute now, and soon after it did Sherlock would likely have satisfying answers to a mystery which had fascinated him since the age of six. So too, after two days hidden away between the covers of poetry volumes and in musty sheds, he should be feeling exhilarated as he looked forward to the more vigorous pursuit that would probably accompany the tracking down of Miss Summerson.

In point of fact, he felt none of these things.  Instead he was restless, unmoored. He arranged and rearranged himself in the seat of the compartment, but his body felt wrong. He lit another cigarette from the butt of the last and twisted about, trying to avert his mental gaze from the spectres of John and Keynes, occupying (it was possible) this very train compartment earlier in the day. No matter how he contorted himself, however, there they were, behind his eyelids. Now Keynes was comforting John as Sherlock had asked, a brotherly hand on his arm, and John was gazing back at Keynes with such a look of gratitude in his eyes, that Sherlock ached to see that look directed at himself instead. Then the scene would shift, and now Keynes’s hands were twining in John’s wiry straw hair, slinking over his shoulders and around his waist, and Keynes’s mouth was twisting into a secret smile over John’s shoulder, thinking of evening out the score on his competition with Strachey; and Sherlock’s nails bit in fury at his clenched palms, because he had sent Keynes along, it was his fault John was being so callously used. Or again, the tableau would change, and now John was confiding in Keynes, telling him stories about John’s past that Sherlock had never asked to know, telling him about Sherlock. And Keynes was nodding, listening with sympathy in his eyes, and suggesting, quietly and sadly, that perhaps it would be best for John to leave Baker Street. And Sherlock _hurt_.

The train slowed with the approach of another hamlet in the gathering dusk. There were five stops to Victoria.

 

***

 

The mantel clock at 221B was chiming nine when Sherlock burst through the front door and scanned the sitting room, out of breath from racing up the stairs two at a time. Compared with the vivid mental images he’d conjured on the train, the normality of the scene before him came as a welcome relief. John and Keynes sat across from one another, half-filled glasses of whisky resting on their knees. Their faces, necks and clothing were grubby from a morning of train travel, but otherwise unmolested. Telltale signs the chaise longue upholstery and in the wrinkles of John’s trousers indicated he had napped there briefly at some point during the afternoon; Keynes had not. The atmosphere in the room was palpably companionable, but nothing more. Sherlock felt a wash of overwhelming gratitude out of all proportion to Keynes’s apparent basic human decency.

Keynes, for his part, was putting his glass aside and getting to his feet as soon as Sherlock appeared at the door. “Ah, Mr. Holmes,” he was saying, “I’m glad you’re here; I was just about to leave. Dr. Watson, thank you _so_ much for your kind hospitality. I’m sure the men from the company will by this point have done what they can to prevent any water damage.”

He moved toward the door, grabbing his hat from the stand, and Sherlock fixed his most penetrating gaze in Keynes’s direction, willing his gratitude to come through. Keynes didn’t look up, but as he passed out the door he grazed the top of Sherlock’s forearm: the briefest reassuring touch before he was rattling down the stairs.

John, for his part, was getting to his feet, his expression complicated. “Holmes,” he said. “I — er — I got your telegram but I didn’t expect you back so soon. Did you wrap up the loose ends in the —“ He trailed off, as Sherlock waved his hand vaguely in a dismissive gesture, staring at John and summoning words.

“Listen,” said John, heaving a breath. “I shouldn’t have said those things to you last night. It was — we were a bad idea, the two of us, so I think we ought to just forget —“ but Sherlock sprang across the room as if stung, speaking over the word “forget.”

“It was wrong,” he said, the words tumbling over each other into a void. “I was wrong to try to make it — safe for myself and not — not for you.”

John gave a little groan. He shook his head and shut his eyes, as if Sherlock’s words were too much. At last he murmured, eyes still closed, “You’re saying you would have been equally — equally _guarded_  with anyone, then? You would have been afraid of — for the sanctity of your mind? With someone else?”

Sherlock was brought up short for a moment, confounded. “Good god, Watson,” he said, after a pause. “With anyone else I would never have cared to _try_.” He gave a little shake of the head: _obvious_ , the gesture said, and John’s lips quirked almost imperceptibly on one side. An aching tenderness replaced some small part of the dread in Sherlock’s chest, and he swayed toward John.

“No, I’m — I should have realised,” went on Sherlock, shaking his head again and speaking more emphatically. “Stupid, so stupid. But I _never_ thought you were — were _contaminated_ or that you _caused_ —“ he shook his head as if to clear it. “Never. And I’m a selfish bastard, John, but I’m —” He took a step forward and whispered, “John. Can we — I want to — to try again.”

Sherlock stared down with wide eyes, pleading, but not reaching out. There was a thick silence, and John’s hand dragged up and up, tracing with rough fingertips the sweep of Sherlock’s collarbone through his cotton shirt. The hush stretched on and Sherlock breathed into it; and then, quiet but firm, bringing his hand further up to cup Sherlock’s nape, John said, “ _What_ would you like to try again, Sherlock?” and Sherlock’s breath quickened with hope at the self-assuredness in John’s voice, and at the sound of his own Christian name. “God, _anything_ ,” he breathed, and John smiled a little indulgent smile as if Sherlock were being naive, or kind.

“No,” Sherlock said, suddenly desperate at the sight of John’s disbelief. “No, _anything_ , John, please, you can do anything, you can sod me or whatever you like, just — _please_ , I —“

John gave a tiny moan, but then he straightened and hushed Sherlock, moving him backwards and sitting him down as he stroked over and over his arms and shoulders. “Shh, Sherlock,” he said, and Sherlock whispered again, “please.”

John was standing over Sherlock where he sat huddled on the chaise longue; was still petting over his shoulders and arms. John sighed. “I don’t know if it’s —,” he said, and paused. “You’ve torn it all down, Sherlock. All my — protection. The wires, you’ve connected them all back up, I think, and I can’t — I can’t be like that, with you, unless you let me in.” His hands bit into Sherlock’s shoulders for the briefest moment, then softened again. “And I’m just not sure you _can_ , Sherlock. If it’s even — right to ask you.”

Sherlock was aware he wasn’t following perfectly, and in a part of his mind that rankled, but he couldn’t slow his brain enough to fix it. Panic. He only wanted John to believe him. “I just _told_ you,” he said, “it’s fine, it’s all fine, you can do whatever you want to me —“

“No,” said John, smiling his sad smile again, “That’s not it, Sherlock. It’s not about an act, it’s — there can’t be a — a gap between us. Not when I’m —” He looked down at Sherlock for a long moment, eyes darting back and forth over his features as if trying to tunnel inside. Then he sighed and sank down, knees on either side of Sherlock’s legs, and snaked his fingers into Sherlock’s curls, tongue licking against Sherlock’s lips and then — oh, warm, wet, lovely mouth. _John_. Kissing John. And Sherlock was greedy for it. Trying to make John believe him with his lips and teeth and tongue.

Then John drew back a bare inch, and said against Sherlock’s mouth, “Can you let me _see_ you? The way you wanted to see me?”

Time stuttered still. Sherlock’s heart was slamming in his ears like a kick drum in free fall, hard and erratic. _Could_ he? He forced air back into lungs, dry tongue over parched lips. He opened his clenched throat and paused and whispered “Yes,” and John gave another little moan, his eyes sliding shut as if overwhelmed, his forehead resting against Sherlock’s, their breath mingling.

At last John opened his eyes. “All right,” he said. “Let’s see,” and Sherlock, in a daze, was up on his feet, following after John, hoping in a desperate panic that his “yes” had been the truth. He thought of the night before, of John spread out beneath him, flushed and writhing and incandescent with need; and then he imagined himself in John’s place, and the wave of emotion that nearly knocked him flat was part lust and part utter terror.

When Sherlock came back to himself John had his hand, and was leading him upstairs. John’s bedroom felt cool and clean to Sherlock’s overstimulated brain, everything tucked and tidied and familiar. John was still touching him, running soft touches along Sherlock’s arms and torso as he backed him toward the bed. There was enough sheer panic in Sherlock’s emotional cocktail that he’d gone completely soft since their kisses downstairs, but John kept _gentling_ him, warm hands on Sherlock’s shoulders and arms, moving him back onto the coverlet, breath-light touches of mouth and hands over Sherlock’s cheeks and his shoulder-blades and the curve of his hips. The choppy edge of terror began to smooth into a placid, liquid surface, and deep below it a rippling current of desire. Sherlock’s cock twitched and he turned his head to catch John’s mouth in a deeper kiss — but gently, so gently, John held him back, checked Sherlock’s movement while he kept up a stream of touches, soft, so soft.

Sherlock’s first instinct, when faced with a new challenge, was always to charge forward: catalogue, analyse, _act_. But John was restraining him, holding him in place, and the light touches were gathering his nerves together under his skin. John was unbuttoning Sherlock’s shirt and ghosting calloused fingers over his stomach and nipples, through his hair and against his mouth. In the absence of the frenzied control that he had taken the night before, and with John curtailing so gently every attempt to increase their languorous pace, Sherlock had simply to _contain_ all this wanting within the space of his own body. The density of it filled him, massed in him. He was burning with it, and it was no surprise to look down and observe his own heaving chest, his cock straining against the flies of his trousers. John’s wrist brushed, maddeningly gentle, along the clothed and aching length of him, and Sherlock keened.

There was no fear, no hesitation left. Sherlock wanted _more_ , but he also wanted, in some obscure way, to show John with his body all the things he’d felt, these last few days. And there was something in him that went calm and still at that, and so he did not push. His entire skin was sensitised now, vibrating at John’s ghosting touches. He felt as if his nerves extended beyond the borders of his body, so that he could feel the tingling approach of John’s lips an instant before they brushed against his inner arm, and the nearing of John’s fingers before they teased and whispered against his waistband. When John’s fingers finally reached into his clothes, freed him from his trousers and underwear, and lightly, so incredibly lightly, began to stroke him, Sherlock thought he might shatter with the strain of slowness.

And then, keeping up the same excruciatingly light touches, John bent to his ear and said, “Tell me, Sherlock. Tell me what it was like, wanting to see me undone.” And Sherlock, though a day ago he could never have brought himself to articulate such a thing, was so relieved to be given an outlet that he moaned, and said in a rush, “God, John, I couldn’t _think_.” John hummed. Sherlock felt the faintest imaginable hint of teeth against the flesh of his earlobe.

“I — I agreed” said Sherlock, “to go to the Summerson house because I already knew what was there, because I couldn’t — I couldn’t see anything but the dust on the knees of your trousers that night, and you’d said you didn’t like to kneel, and I —“ John chuckled, trailed delicate kisses down the sweat-soaked ridge of Sherlock’s spine.

“— I wondered if he’d persuaded you against your will, or if — _oh_ — or if you wanted him so much that you’d liked it, even though you don’t normally, and I — _ungh_ —“ because John was suckling, _intolerably_ gently, at Sherlock’s nipple, while he kept up the teasing touches to his cock, “I could tell he hadn’t — hadn’t kissed you and I wondered if you didn’t like kissing and I thought about kissing — kissing you, I — thought about your mouth on me and I wanted it so bloody much, I couldn’t — _oh God John_ —”

For at this last John’s hand had clenched involuntarily and for a moment there was as much pressure as Sherlock needed, before the agonising lightness of touch returned. Language shut down in Sherlock’s head. His hips kicked up helplessly, chasing the lost sensation. John pulled off his soft suckling of Sherlock’s nipple, panting against his skin, and:  

“Christ,” he said, “keep talking, Sherlock. I would go on my knees for you any time you asked.” Sherlock nearly sobbed.

John reached down with the hand not stroking Sherlock’s cock, and drew up one of Sherlock’s hands from where it had been clutching at the coverlet. He brought it to his own mouth and licked softly, _so_ softly over the pads and knuckles of Sherlock’s fingers, his pink tongue flickering out against the delicate webbing at the base of Sherlock’s thumb, his lips wrapping around the very tips of Sherlock’s pointer and middle fingers, just short of the first knuckle, and suckling with excruciating tenderness as he stared into Sherlock’s eyes.

Sherlock _couldn’t_ keep speaking; there were no more words. He was an unraveled thread. But he was also consumed with the desire to give John something, to _connect_ , and so the sounds came from his mouth with no conscious thought: “God John I was terrified — I — I wanted you, I — want — please, I _need_ —“

And finally, _finally_ , without breaking eye contact, John took Sherlock’s middle three fingers deep into his mouth, sucking hard, his tongue pressed up against their undersides, and simultaneously tightened his grip around Sherlock’s cock, and instantly Sherlock was coming so hard he felt as if he was being turned inside out. And even as his entire body was convulsing in pleasure, even as he was flying apart, he was held steady inside the compass of John’s hands. Grounded; safe.

Some time after — he couldn’t say if it was seconds or minutes — he came back to earth to find John curled in a comma shape against his body, still sucking hard on Sherlock’s fingers and touching himself frantically. Sherlock’s breath caught at the sight and he felt a pang of disappointment when, seconds later, John moaned softly and came all over Sherlock’s hip.

“I’m sorry,” John said, panting and kissing across Sherlock’s shoulder and chest, “I couldn’t wait. Christ, you’re so _beautiful_ like that, Sherlock, I couldn’t —“

Sherlock pulled John against him despite the mess, needing to hold on. He felt flayed open.

When John’s breathing had steadied into even clouds against Sherlock’s chest, Sherlock said into the top of his head, “So that’s how you like it, then?” and John lifted his head, quirked an eyebrow at him. Sherlock went on, looking up at the ceiling, “Soft and slow and — that’s what you like?”

“What I like?” John said, and licked his lips, stretched up to speak into Sherlock’s ear. “ _I’d_ like you to pin me up against the bedroom door with my hands over my head and my legs around your waist, and do your best to fuck me through the wood until I come sobbing.”

“ _P-pardon_?” Sherlock croaked, and John chuckled to hear how plummy and public-school his accent became when he was shocked. “Then why the blazes didn’t we do — do _that_? Jesus’s _blood_ , John.”

John grinned, planting a quick kiss on Sherlock’s chest. “We will,” he said, and then his smile faded. “You were begging me for this with everything but your voice, last night. It felt like — like cutting off my own hand, not being able to give it to you.”

Sherlock opened his mouth, waited, then closed it again. He huffed, and dragged John back, snug against his side.

 

***

 

Half an hour later, still feeling so naked it verged on skinned, yet oddly happy about it, Sherlock asked him about Daniel. They were sharing an ashtray, tendrils of smoke drifting up from the moonlit sheets where they lay tangled in each others’ limbs. John took a long moment to exhale, then rolled onto his back, staring up at the ceiling. Sherlock raised himself onto his side and slid his ﬁngers lightly over the armour of John’s breastbone.

“In a way it was sudden,” said John at last, into the silence. “But in others — I realised later on, when I looked back through his sketchbooks, that it was coming on for a while. He’d been a student; he left secondary school to enlist.” John smiled, wry, at Sherlock’s raised eyebrows. “Yes, I know, over a decade younger than I was — just a boy really, a golden youth. And so very,” he sighed, exhaling a stream of smoke, “so very passionate. Believed he was preserving the sacred English way of life, keeping the world safe for the civilising inﬂuences of King and Country.” John grimaced. “I never — I knew I was doing good out there, I was saving lives, but I never had that kind of faith. I think I felt, somehow, that his would rub off on me if I just got — close enough.” John stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray, and Sherlock silently handed him another one. He just slid it back and forth in his ﬁngers for a time, thinking.

“Anyway,” he went on, “after everything happened I went back through his sketchbooks and it was obvious that he became — anxious, fairly quickly. He was documenting the front, just botany and weapons and everyday sketches of the camp, at ﬁrst. But then, after we’d seen some action, he dwelt on the carnage. How could you not? But Daniel, he _felt_ things so, and the style of his drawings, they were — obsessive. Physically obsessive about detail, and also somehow — emotionally obsessive.” He twitched in frustration. “I can’t explain it.”

Sherlock nuzzled his free hand in the line of soft hair running down from John’s navel. “You’re doing well,” he said, and kissed John’s shoulder. John gave a brief, tight smile.

“I think he started — imagining things,” he said. “I think he was terriﬁed. I mean, we all were, but — he started making these drawings that conﬂated the carnage with other scenes, other people. He would draw, oh, his parents, say, but they would be lying dead in the mud of a trench, bullets through their chests. Or, one week I was treating the survivors of a mustard gas attack. Respiratory damage, they were gasping like they were drowning in air, and weeping blisters all over their skin. And later I found — Daniel had done a study of one of the victims, only it was me. Instead of the victim’s face, his body, it was — mine.”

John took a deep breath, let it out, then leaned over to light his second cigarette from the glowing end of Sherlock’s. Sherlock ran the edge of his knuckles over John’s cheekbone, saying nothing.

“I don’t think he was actually, um, confused at that point,” John said, settling back onto the mattress. “I think he knew what he was drawing wasn’t real. But Jesus Christ, he was only a kid. He was so scared, and seeing so much death every day. And well, I didn’t realise most of this until later; I had my own responsibilities. We didn’t get much time together, and when we did we — did our best to comfort one another.” Sherlock closed his eyes brieﬂy, then opened them again, and nodded.

“But then,” said John, “that day. We were near Ypres; it wasn’t too long after the mustard gas attack. And we were hit early in the morning, shells detonating everywhere. We’d — we’d been having a row, is the awful thing, just fighting hell for leather over some stupid thing. I’d lost a patient I’d thought would live — well, it happened all the time. But this day I just — I got down, just so bloody fed up with the whole hopeless, pointless war. And Daniel, he — he always blamed me when I got like that. Maybe it scared him, I don’t know. He was clinging on to — something. And he wanted me to patch it up, not tear it to pieces. We got vicious with each other that night.

“And then the shells were falling, and we both scrambled to get back to our companies. I lost track of him. I got back to — there was another medic in my company, Bob Vaughn, we usually worked as a team. He, um, he looked something like me, you know, blond, solid, on the short side. We got teased about it: the medic twins, Vaughn and Watson.

“And anyway, that day Bob and I were doing triage together during a break in the shelling, trying to patch up lads who could likely make it back on the ambulances. Wouldn’t even have been out on the ﬁeld, but we’d had heavy casualties among our ambulance drivers all that month, so Bob and I were subbing in. Bob was just a — just a little way off, bending over a body, and I didn’t even know Daniel was about, I was so bloody exhausted and just — in that zone of utter focus.” He laughed very slightly in realisation, and glanced sideways at Sherlock. Sherlock smiled a little, acknowledging his intimate knowledge of that kind of concentration, and he felt a surge of pride, that something about him could break through such a dark memory and make John smile.

John squeezed Sherlock’s arm, and took a long drag on his cigarette. “And then,” he said, “suddenly the lull was over. The shelling started again, we were both right out in the open. I was facing Bob when he was hit. I looked up for a moment, he nodded at me, and then the mud next to him just exploded. I and saw him thrown to the side, and his — his neck snapped back, all the way back.

“And then, from behind where Bob had been, I saw Daniel running toward the body, just — just _screaming_ , out of his mind. I tried to get his attention, ﬂag him down, because it did — it did occur to me, you know, that he’d seen Bob from behind, our uniforms were the same, Daniel might have thought it was me. But he was just — ﬁxated on getting to the body, he didn’t see me, and he was still running when another bit of ground exploded right in front of him.”

John and Sherlock breathed together into the silence. John took a last drag on his cigarette and stubbed it out. He rearranged himself on the bed so that his back was cradled into Sherlock’s front, and Sherlock breathed against the back of John’s neck, and trailed his ﬁngers down John’s side, over and over. He could almost feel the heaviness in his own hands as he touched John, the weight of this ruined boy forever sitting on John’s chest.

After a time John broke the silence. “I got to Bob ﬁrst, but I already knew he’d died on impact. Daniel was just knocked unconscious; god, even through the adrenaline I was so relieved. I got him into the ambulance and the driver and I made it back to the ﬁeld hospital. He was still out cold, but his vitals were all right. I was needed about ten other places in the tent all at bloody once, but I made sure Daniel had a cot, that he was taken care of the best we could before I ran back to keep triaging the other casualties. I felt guilty I couldn’t stay with him that night, but when I went back and checked in the morning, he was still out.

“Well, the next three days were just hell on all of us. I worked more or less around the clock, kipping on cots when I couldn’t stand up anymore. It wasn’t just Daniel, we were hemorrhaging men, but I also didn’t want to leave the tent when he was still unconscious. It was four days later when I finally got up from a nap and crossed over, first thing like I always did, to check on him. He —”

John’s voice caught, as if his throat had closed on him, and his breath was ragged. Sherlock’s arms went around John’s chest and his waist and held on tight. It was several minutes before John spoke again.

“He’d woken up, he was even sitting up a bit on his elbows, sort of — scanning the crowd. He looked perfectly lucid, and I was so relieved all over again. And then he looked right at me, and his — his eyes were confused for a moment, and I came forward, thinking maybe he couldn’t see me very well, because it was quite dark. But he just — kept looking at me, confused, and then his face closed up. And he said, ‘You must be one of the brothers. Captain Watson’s brothers.’ He saw me but he didn’t — didn’t recognise who I was.” Sherlock hissed, and held John even tighter from behind.

“Of course I tried to — well, I didn’t know what to say. I reached out to touch his shoulder and he cringed away from me. Went on about how Captain Watson had never told him one of his brothers was serving so close by, a doctor too, was I? The family resemblance was so strong, he said, and then — then he said, ‘I suppose they sent you in to me because I saw him die. You should know he didn’t suffer.’

“And I tried to — to explain that it was Bob he’d seen killed, not me, I was John, he knew me. But he got very agitated then, started yelling at me that he would know the difference, and why was I impersonating Captain Watson — and I think he must have been anxious, too, about how much my supposed brother knew about what was going on between me and him, because he was yelling not to touch him, and ‘I don’t know what you think you know about me, but bugger off.’ At that point I just wanted to calm him down, comfort him. So I said whatever I had to, played along until we could get him to a better place.

“I didn’t know what to think. The thought occurred, you know, that maybe he was punishing me, because of the row we’d had.” John sighed, shaky and deep. After a moment, he said, “But that wasn’t it; it lasted. He never knew me as John Watson again.”

Sherlock was silent, pressing into John’s skin with hands and hips, and twining his legs around John as if he wanted the maximum contact possible between two skins. After a long silence, he said, “It was because of what he’d seen? What he thought he’d seen?” and John sighed again, and turned over to look at Sherlock.

“I don’t honestly know,” he said, picking up one of Sherlock’s hands and turning it over, feeling its different surfaces with his own. “At ﬁrst, yeah, it seemed that way. But later, when it was clear the damage was long-term, and I made arrangements to insititutionalise him, his mother and sister came to meet us. And he, um, he thought they were impostors, as well. Told them with those cold eyes that his real family was dead, he would know his real family, and what was their game?” Sherlock hissed again, and John nodded. “They got out pretty quick, after that. As did I; I had to get back to the front. That was only two months before the ceaseﬁre.”

Sherlock, acutely aware of not knowing what to say, drew John back toward him, pressed John’s head to his own chest, and stroked his hair. “Thank you,” he said at last into the top of John’s head, and John’s arms tightened around him. Half an hour later, they were both asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. John’s memories of trains might imply that he and Daniel met around the time of the First Battle of the Somme (1916); that John’s third leave might have been just before or after the Battle of Arras (1917), when Daniel still appears to be well, and that Daniel’s mental illness had manifested by the time of the Second Battle of the Somme (1918), very late in the war.
> 
> 2\. All the tomfoolery at 46 Gordon Square is either historical or based on historical events; they can all be found in the second volume of Robert Skidelsky’s John Maynard Keynes: Economist as Savior. The person who came home to out-of-order WCs and Bunny Garnett in his bed was actually Clive Bell, and Vanessa Bell was actually better with servants than depicted; otherwise it’s all true.
> 
> 3\. Vanessa’s sister was Virginia Woolf, who struggled with a lifelong terror of dealing with her servants.
> 
> 4\. In addition to PTSD, Daniel is suffering from a rare but real disorder called [Capgras Syndrome](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capgras_syndrome), which sometimes results from severe head trauma. Victims retain normal cognitive ability with the exception of the delusion that a person or people (or objects) close to them have been replaced with imposters. Huge thanks to Emma de los Nardos for helping me sort out the neuropathology of this syndrome and apply it to my preexisting ideas about Daniel’s backstory.


	10. Out of the window, perilously spread

 

150 11.0 SE LON 715A JUNE 20 1920  
SHERLOCK HOLMES, 221B BAKER STREET, LONDON ENGLAND  
  
59 PENNYFIELDS RD COME IMMEDIATELY BILLY

 

***

 

Ten minutes after being torn from some of the deepest, kindest sleep he could remember, John was hopping from foot to foot, pulling on socks and demanding explanations from the agitated blur that was his flatmate.  
  
Sherlock hadn’t stopped moving since vaulting out of bed. John’s eyes had opened to the sight of him snatching John’s dressing gown from the hook by the door, pulling it on, and rushing from the room. John’s mind had whirred and clicked to life, assembling the pieces: Sherlock, naked in his bed — last night’s caresses and confidences. Sherlock could be panicking again, but — no, the sound of the bell. John had remembered the sound of the bell, and realised Sherlock had gone to intercept the telegraph boy.  
  
Relief had rolled over him. Sherlock wasn’t panicking, wasn’t running away. Not yet, anyway. And he hadn’t run, even after John had told him — after Sherlock had _asked_ — about Daniel. It had been the first time John had told anyone the whole story. He felt — lighter. Slightly terrified as well, but lighter, and still a bit liquid when he thought of Sherlock shaking and keening under his hands, letting John inside. Feeling that nothing was certain but that anything, remarkably, was possible, John stretched and smiled, then chuckled. That dressing gown really was scandalously short on Sherlock. John hoped the telegraph boy hadn’t looked too closely.  
  
He had sighed, then, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. That particular buzzing intensity about Sherlock’s movements likely meant a breakthrough on the case, and a long day ahead.  
  
John was rooting sleepily in his dresser for a vest, listening with one ear for signs of the telegraph boy’s departure, when Sherlock burst back into the room and began castigating him for his slow start. “Billy’s _signal_ , Watson!” he had said, simultaneously beaming and shaking John by the shoulders. “The game’s afoot, at last!”  
  
“Wait, we’re — pardon?” John had said, vest in one hand and balled-up socks in the other, laughing at Sherlock’s indignation. But Sherlock had been off, kissing John hard and quick and jubilant before galloping down the hall in John’s too-short dressing gown, shouting instructions as John withdrew again to finish dressing. “Where are we going?” John had yelled down the stairs at one point, but, “Bring your revolver!” was Sherlock’s only reply, and John had rolled his eyes as he tucked it into the back of his trousers.  
  
It wasn’t until they were settled in a cab, John sleep-tousled and tea-deprived but also still glowing a bit with the sense of possibility, that Sherlock started answering questions. Even then, it took a false start or two before he managed to slow his brain to a comprehensible speed, and before John could get his sufficiently focused on the task at hand.  
  
“I don’t know,” Sherlock was saying, “how much you gathered at the time, but some smuggling connection was surely obvious from the moment Mrs. Summerson — what?”  
  
“Er — not that much,” John said, smiling at the familiarity of the interaction. “I hadn’t gathered quite that much.”  
  
“No?” said Sherlock, looking almost offended. “What were you doing, then, searching through that particular stack of my papers? You mean you haven’t grasped the connection, this whole time?”  
  
“Ah,” said John. “The stack of papers, let me guess. Miss Summerson was secretly working as a chef at La Fermette Marbeuf, was she? Specialising in veal cutlets? Or perhaps she was an undercover dressmaker during the 1912 winter season?”  
  
Sherlock’s mouth quirked. “No,” he said. “But that’s — your recall is improving, I think. That’s very good, J — Watson.”  
  
John fought back a giggle. “Must keep up, mustn’t I?” he said, and Sherlock’s mouth widened into a grin before he looked away out the cab window.  
  
“Not the _carte du soir_ or or suiting samples,” Sherlock repeated. “No, the relevant detail for our purposes is the Home Office’s recent and frankly idiotic push to criminalise cocaine and smoking opium. I knew as soon as I read about it — well, as soon as I heard it from my brother’s pompous mouth, more accurately — exactly what I was looking — what’s wrong now?”  
  
For John’s smile had turned to a grimace. “Nothing, it’s just — I assumed you kept that clipping because of your — your personal interest in it.”  
  
Sherlock rapped smartly with his knuckles on the glass. His cocaine use had been, during the past year, the subject of some of the flatmates’ bitterest arguments, but at the moment he looked more impressed than distressed. As if he considered  it perceptive of John to mention Sherlock’s personal history at this specific juncture.  
  
“Ah,” said Sherlock, holding up a finger, “but I have a number of indebted doctors at my disposal, don’t I, who would write me a perfectly legal prescription.” A pause. John rolled his shoulders, looking away from Sherlock while he tried to distinguish professional disapproval from personal jealousy. “And another doctor,” Sherlock added softly, “who dissuades me from requesting one.”  
  
John looked around, sharp, and Sherlock’s eyes were dwelling on him with an expression John couldn’t quite place. Intense, but gentle. John felt as if a thread stretched taut in his chest, aching and sweet, fierce with fear and tenderness. It hung tight a moment, then quietly snapped; and Sherlock took a moment to reel in his gaze, and clear his throat.  
  
“Think about it, Watson,” Sherlock said then, slipping back into his accustomed breezy, pedantic tone as the cab clattered toward the docks. “It’s the exact same situation as this bloody Prohibition nonsense they’ve got up to in America. Take an intoxicant, make it widely available for decades. Then criminalise it. Surely even _you_ can predict what will happen.”  
  
John rolled his eyes; apparently, a night spent melting under John’s hands had done nothing to staunch the flow of Holmesian condescension. It was exasperating, thought John, but also oddly steadying. He said, “Well, it will stop some people.”  
  
“Yes,” said Sherlock. “And the others?”  
  
“Those with a dependency can get a prescription —“  
  
“Those with a dependency, funds, and access to a _doctor_ can get a prescription,” corrected Sherlock. “But for those with less than three out of three, or those for whom the illegality is an allure, it will surely be easier to go underground.”  
  
John nodded, slowly, and Sherlock smiled. “This legislation will — eventually — close down the smoking dens and force opium use into private homes. Limehouse is one neighborhood, Watson; there are private homes all over the country.”  
  
He smirked, leaned closer to John. “If I were a pharmacist at some remove from the law,” he said, “I know what I’d do. I’d be insane not to take advantage of the demand, of the opportunities for expansion. I’d secure my supply lines, and keep an eye out for a particular — type. Young people, from working-class families but looking up the social ladder. Don’t want to toil in a factory all their lives, enamoured of the bohemian way of life, of a bit of excitement. A potential partner.” He raised one eyebrow at John, and John’s eyes widened.  
  
“You think Callie Summerson —“  
  
“Is that partner, yes,” said Sherlock, as the cab turned into Pennyfields Road. “I think she’s found a more stimulating business venture than stitching aprons in Sloane Street. Knowing what I was looking for — her class, her dissatisfaction at home, her bohemian associations, the sudden change in her behaviour a year ago — it was no great leap to recognise it when Mrs. Summerson walked in the door.”  
  
Sherlock’s tone was distracted; he was peering out the window at the dusty bay windows and chipped pediments lining the south side of the street. John was looking around himself, as well. Despite having heard legends of the illicit attractions of Oriental Limehouse, and despite knowing that Sherlock came here for both information and cocaine, his last real experience of the place dated back to his childhood in nearby Stepney. In the intervening years — nearly twenty, he realised with dismay — the streets had become more crowded, and the population of hearty, red-cheeked German and Norwegian sailors had largely been replaced by wiry, bronze-skinned Chinese ones. The building exteriors, sun-bleached and rain-grimed, looked as if few repairs had been made since John was here last.  
  
Still, he thought, as compared to the stories in the papers and in the pulp press, which trumpeted about opium dens and the forcible prostitution of white women, it seemed a surprisingly ordinary street. Shopkeepers were wheeling kiosks and signs onto the pavements, tidying their window displays, stocking their produce stands with fresh vegetables. A small child, blonde-haired and sepia-skinned, clutched a paper-wrapped parcel as she stepped down from the raised doorway of what looked to be an apothecary’s shop. The middle-aged proprietor was smiling down at her, holding open the door. Well, thought John. Probably few neighborhoods look threatening at eight o’clock on a Monday morning.  
  
His attention returned abruptly to the cab when Sherlock tapped on the glass, alerting the driver. They pulled into the nearest alley on the south side. Sherlock tossed a few bills to the cabbie, glancing around; his eyes settled across the street, and he thumped with his hand on the top of the cab’s roof for it to drive away.  
  
A freckled ginger youth was sidling across the way. John recognised Billy Morrigan, Sherlock’s regular informant. Sherlock checked the pavement in front of the shop (no comers), then withdrew further into the shadows of the alley. Billy followed, and propped himself next to Sherlock against the brick wall.  
  
“She’s been checking more often all morning,” Billy said.  
  
“You made sure she’d seen you over the last few days?” Sherlock asked, and Billy nodded.  
  
“Good,” continued Sherlock, “she’s running out of time. How many exits to the shop?” John was looking from man to boy with good-natured confusion.  
  
“Only two,” said Billy. “The front one onto the street, and the back gives onto the courtyard.” He pointed, and John turned to look back through the alley where the narrow brick walls widened to let in more light. He could see, in cross-section, layers upon layers of washing-strung lines. The occasional silhouette moved among them, but there was no one on the same side of the washing who could observe the three men.  
  
“Right,” Sherlock said, flattening himself against the alley wall as he peered around the corner, looking up at the windows above Number 59. No further explanation seemed forthcoming, and John and Billy stared around them for a few minutes. John’s ear caught a hint of children at play: that distant, joyful shrieking echoing off the brick.  
  
Eventually Sherlock repeated “Right,” and ducked back into the alley. “She’s seen you’re gone. We’ll give you a minute to go around back; keep out of sight, but watch the door.” He plucked a blue scarf from his pocket and held it out. “Tie this around that piece of timber —“ and he pointed at a wooden support a few feet out from the entrance to alley, “— to confirm she’s gone. Follow her when she leaves, but keep well back; don’t approach her. I have a good idea where she’s headed, but confirmation never goes amiss. Understood?”  
  
John would have shaken his head, but Billy nodded. “Good boy,” Sherlock said, and then “Come, Watson,” and he was turning the corner back onto Pennyfields Road, strolling down the pavement, and then turning the handle of the peeling door to Number 59.  
  
After the dilapidated exterior, John was surprised at the orderly brightness inside the shop. The space was tiny, with a staircase at its far end leading up to what John assumed was Callie Summerson’s hiding place. Along the left-hand wall was a long wooden counter topped with a red-and-orange runner. Behind the counter stood an impressive honeycomb of drawers and cubbyholes, all, from what John could see, stuffed with loose herbs and tea leaves, or with ricepaper-wrapped packets of the same. The system, he thought wryly, would no doubt appeal to Sherlock: everything obviously had its place, but that place would be apparent only to the one who invented it.  
  
Sherlock was scanning the drawers with apparent nonchalance. He was making some inquiry of the proprietor, a small man in a loose-fitting black garment and a soft cylindrical cap, who was glancing upstairs every few seconds.. “…for some oolong,” Sherlock was saying. “Something from the inner regions of the Wuyi Mountains. Do you stock anything of the sort?”  
  
The proprietor nodded in a perfunctory way and turned to the drawers, a few streaks of grey showing in his long black queue. He removed one drawer from the wall, placed it on the counter. “Bohea black,” he muttered in a bored voice, nodding again at Sherlock and glancing back toward the stairs.  
  
John had half his mind on Sherlock and half on all the obscure elements of the case. He was pacing the right-hand wall of the shop, where tall cylindrical wooden cups, some with decorative enameling, held an intriguing assortment of wooden utensils. John spotted long wooden tapers; tools resembling blunt-edged pincers; and objects like small wooden bowls with the bottoms missing. He wondered vaguely about their no-doubt exotic applications.  
  
Back at the counter, Sherlock was shaking his head. “Nothing so heavily smoked,” he was saying, and the proprietor looked at him in annoyance. For the first time, the man’s full attention seemed trained on  this troublesome European patron, taking in Sherlock’s wild curls and flamboyant overcoat.  
  
“Sherlock Holmes,” said Sherlock, holding out his hand, and the proprietor nodded curtly without extending his. “Li Yuen,” he said, and offered nothing more.  
  
“Mr. Li,” Sherlock went on, as the man glanced again toward the stairs, “it so happens that one night before the war, in St. Petersburg, I spent the afternoon with a man from Nanping. He was kind enough to share with me a fine - I believe he called it a ‘cliff tea.’ The mineral tang in the air by the rocky cliffs, I could almost — I could almost taste it.”  
  
Li Yuen was looking surprised, even skeptical, but his attention was more firmly on Sherlock than ever. As was John’s; the way Sherlock had pronounced the word _taste_ sent shivers up his neck. He barely noticed a faint rustling coming from the top of the stairs.  
  
“What I remember,” went on Sherlock, pacing a bit and making precise, delicate gestures in the air with his hands, “was the way the flavour changed with each steeping. We talked for hours, you understand.” He waited a moment, and Mr. Li nodded, eyebrows raised. John licked his lips.  
  
“The first few cups were rich, roasted, no smoke flavour covering it up, not like —” he gestured at the drawer of Bohea on the counter. “And then as the evening went on the taste became dirtier, stonier. As if the flavour were descending into the very soil. My _hands_ actually —” Sherlock spread his long fingers as he paced, “my hands began to _tingle_.” John made a small, overwhelmed sound, which he prayed was inaudible to anyone but himself. Mr. Li was nodding a little now, following Sherlock up and down the room with his eyes. His arms were uncrossing. Upstairs, the rustling receded, away from the shop.  
  
“And when I raised the cup to my lips,” Sherlock said, “after the last swallow, and inhaled, there was a faint sweetness, just teasing, at the back of my throat, I couldn’t quite place it. I breathed —“ he closed his eyes, his hand hovering near his lips; John’s mouth was slightly open, “— breathed it in, trying to put my finger on what it was, this familiar dark sweetness, like caramelised fruit in my throat, at the back of my mouth, like a…”  
  
“Plum,” said Mr. Li, his mouth at last breaking into a reluctant smile. John was panting, but attempting to do so subtly, holding himself up against one of the small display tables lining the wall. Luckily Mr. Li seemed wholly focused now on Sherlock, who turned, smiling back at him.  
  
“Plum,” he exclaimed, his expression delighted in a rare, doubled way John had come to recognise. Glad that his mark was cooperating and distracted, but also genuinely enjoying the interaction.  
  
“Yes,” Sherlock confirmed again. “Plum. I’ve thought of it many times in the years since.”  
  
Mr. Li turned slowly, walked to the far end of the counter and bent down with his back to Sherlock, rifling in a crate on the floor. Sherlock took the opportunity to page through the few papers piled neatly on the counter next to the cash register: correspondence in English and Mandarin; bills from suppliers and utility companies, some of them marked Urgent; a very recent bill from the office of a Doctor Connolly; papers in Mandarin that had the look of packing slips. Sherlock’s hand was well away from the pile before Mr. Li had straightened up again, eyeing him with some mixture of suspicion and appreciation.  
  
“I do not have this usually,” he said. “English — _most_ English prefer Bohea, Lapsang Souchang. And Chinese sailors cannot afford it.”  
  
He held a small red-silk sachet out to Sherlock, who inhaled deeply and made a rough sound of appreciation deep in his throat. John felt a pang of jealousy, which he quickly assured himself was ridiculous. About as ridiculous as getting hard from listening to Sherlock describe a cup of bloody tea. He cleared his throat, shook his head. Faintly, he heard the sound of a door closing on the other side of the stairs.  
  
“I only have a small amount now,” Mr. Li was saying. “It was a recent gift from my mother in Fuzhou. I could sell you…” the man looked down at the purse in his hand, considering, “half an ounce? Fifteen shillings.”  
  
Sherlock grinned, but said only, “Tea merchants are they, your relatives? You trained in this business?”  
  
“My father is a doctor,” said Mr. Li tersely. “Fifteen shillings.”  
  
“Twelve shillings,” countered Sherlock, and Mr. Li looked stern.  
  
“I would not sell it at all,” he said, “if you had not described so exactly the flavour. It is from my personal store. Fifteen shillings.”  
  
Sherlock seemed to consider, scanning the shelves. From the corner of his eye, John caught the flutter of a blue scarf through the shop window.  
  
Sherlock nodded. “One pound, and you include a pu erh cha,” he said, pointing to a compartment containing a pile of fist-sized compressed tea nests wrapped in the red and white rice paper they had taken from Miss Summerson’s West Lavington house.  
  
Mr. Li looked briefly taken aback, but then nodded warily. “One pu erh cha,” he confirmed, “plus a half ounce of da hong pao. One pound.”  
  
Sherlock sorted through the coins in his pocket as Mr. Li measured out the oolong. It was just over half of the total amount in the sachet, and there was a certain reverence on both sides as he passed the small paper parcel over the counter. John cleared his throat again, and was just about presentable by the time Sherlock thanked Mr. Li, said his farewells, and turned and gestured John back out the front door.

 

***

 

Sherlock was buzzing with satisfaction as he herded John from the tea shop. His mind and body always felt most in harmony when a case was coming smoothly together, when the machinery of his plans clicked over, neat and well-oiled; and today, he thought, unknotting his blue scarf from around the support timber, was coming together very nicely indeed. Although he normally gave little thought to the lasting consequences suffered or enjoyed by the subjects of his investigations, he had to admit that in this case it pleased him: if everything went off as planned, there might be no lasting damage to anyone involved.  
  
Perhaps, he thought wryly, it was lingering giddiness from the night before that was causing this beneficence. Because his satisfaction at the moment ran deep; there was another quality overlaid with his jubilant case-borne clockwork. His flayed feeling of last night, as if John had removed Sherlock’s very skin, had mellowed into an exquisite sensitivity. He always enjoyed John’s company on cases, but now he felt as if he could track John’s position in relation to himself without looking, without listening, by skin sense alone. He was hypersensitive to John’s physical reactions, and to his own reactions to John. For a habitually self-reliant person, it was a fascinating, if somewhat alarming, revelation. He was conscious of having played up the sensualism of his descriptions in the tea shop, for the sole purpose of experimenting with this novel feedback loop: John’s breath changing at the sound of Sherlock’s words changing at the sensation of John’s breath.  
  
All of this, he told himself now, was likely idle fancy. Especially since he didn’t _feel_ it coming when John interrupted his thoughts to start in again with questions. Sherlock shook his head at himself, walking along toward the Docks.  
  
“It doesn’t make sense,” John was saying in an undertone. “If Miss Summerson intended to hide herself away for five days above a shop in Pennyfields Road, why would she write to her mother that she was coming last Thursday?”  
  
“Ah,” said Sherlock, clearing his throat, “well. Her plan, obviously, was to arrive that Thursday on an earlier train, conduct her business on shipboard before six in the evening, and be back at the train station in time for her mother to fetch her. Then her letters and her mother’s testimony would provide any necessary cover.”  
  
“But instead…?” said John, when no more explanation was forthcoming.  
  
“I’m afraid the original delay was my lookout,” Sherlock said. “ _I_ told Lestrade to increase undercover presence in the area, and the idiot interpreted that to mean more raids. Heaven knows how he’s kept his position this long. Thursday was the first — raid, that is — which means the local police would have alerted Mr. Li well beforehand, and all hands would have been engaged in hiding or disposing of evidence. Miss Summerson missed her chances to meet her ship _and_ her mother, and by the time she could engineer another opportunity…”  
  
“Billy?” John guessed. They were rounding the corner of King Street now, passing the looming, abandoned iron works, and John lowered his voice even further though there was no one passing.  
  
“Billy,” Sherlock confirmed. “I clearly specified that he should make sure he was _seen_ from the shop windows. She only has, what? a year’s experience at most in this business, and she’s still got a healthy dose of paranoia.” He was thoughtful for a moment, then continued. “In any case, Billy’s kept her pigeonholed. But she’s getting desperate. By my calculations, the only ship she could be waiting for is scheduled to leave late this afternoon, which just con…firms…”  
  
Sherlock’s voice trailed off, and a moment later he was shoving John sideways against the wall of an old factory outbuilding, one hand over his mouth and the other pinning his shoulder against the wall, as a young, black-haired woman turned a corner just a few yards ahead of them. She was wearing a brown sack dress, and although paler than Mrs. Summerson, she shared that lady’s stoutness, stubby fingers, and upturned nose.  
  
The girl turned away, hurrying toward the docks as they had been, and Sherlock peered sharp around the corner, keeping his eyes on her back and his hand on John’s mouth for nearly a full minute. His attention was still lingering down the street and he was saying “Has to be her. And she couldn’t have overheard us over all the noise from the —“ when he finally turned and saw John’s eyes laughing up at him above the fleshy bit of the back of his hand.  
  
“Er,” said Sherlock, a bit sheepishly, as he withdrew his hand, hearing for the briefest moment _With my hands over my head and my legs around your waist_...  
  
“This wasn’t the venue I had in mind,” said John, like he could see Sherlock’s thoughts unspooling, and suddenly they were both giggling uncontrollably, backed up against the dirty white stone wall. It felt very… _together_ , laughing and breathless in a back alley with John. And then the giggling fit was over, and they were slipping out from behind the outbuilding, the brown-clad woman a distant speck further down the street.  
  
Even John, thought Sherlock, would have a difficult time portraying any great romance or adventure in the scene before them. It was, in fact, one of the least ominous-seeming tail jobs he had ever participated in. The June sun was bright and warm for once over London, and the West India Docks, which would undoubtedly paint an atmospheric picture illuminated only by gas lamp in the shadows of midnight, now seemed almost stubbornly mundane. Seamen and cleaning women converged on the spot with sleepy reluctance; small men with manifolds argued patiently with delivery drivers; the sun shone on the grime and slime of the great ship-sides, and all in all it was hard to imagine a less picturesque setting.  
  
Sherlock and John hung back as the small brown shape of Callie Summerson took her place among a group of other women in similarly plain costume. A older woman, solid and grey-haired with a commanding voice, bellowed instructions at them as they blinked sleepily up at her. Then, shouldering buckets and cloths amidst a low buzz of conversation, they filed onto the gangplank of the HMS Derbyshire.  
  
When Miss Summerson was out of sight, John turned to Sherlock. “What’s our plan then? Get on board ourselves? Catch her in the act? I assume we haven’t just followed her here to observe a change in respectable position as cleaning-woman.”  
  
“Watch and wait, Watson,” Sherlock said. “It may take some little while, but I very much doubt this particular cleaning woman will serve out a full shift.”  
  
John nodded, then gestured with his head. Across the way, the smell of fish and batter was wafting out of a timbered hole in the stone wall. Sherlock rolled his eyes, but John hadn’t eaten since the night before, and Sherlock — well, thought Sherlock. He supposed he hadn’t taken anything since breakfast at the Black Horse the morning previous. So he followed in John’s wake, and soon they were propped against the white stone, devouring greasy fish and chips out of smudgy newsprint, and Sherlock thought the sounds John was making more than compensated for the distasteful necessity of eating.

 

***

 

Four hours later, however, and even Sherlock had to admit that the thrill was gone. The sun had progressed from pleasantly warm to uncomfortably hot; his stomach from uncomfortably full to threateningly empty, and they had barely moved from the out-of-the-way stretch of wall where they had eaten earlier.  
  
“If I’d ever imagined tailing a smuggling suspect through Limehouse and the Docklands,” John said aloud, though under his breath, “this is not the scene that would have leapt to mind.”  
  
Sherlock’s mouth quirked, amused. “What did you imagine, Watson?” he murmured. “A Sax Rohmer novel? Illicit Oriental masterminds and darkened warrens of debauchery?”  
  
John grumbled. “Little debauchery wouldn’t go amiss about now. I think my leg’s fallen asleep.” He stamped on the pavement, trying to clear the pins and needles. Sherlock slid his eyes over John; opened his mouth; closed it again.  
  
Despite all claims to the contrary, Sherlock Holmes was conscious — was, to be honest, unreasonably fond — of timing his verbal revelations for greatest dramatic effect. His instincts, born of long habit, were to keep his deductions to himself until he could astound his listeners with a fully-formed account of how events had transpired — or at least until he could be sure his own account would be more fully-formed than anyone else’s. It went against the Holmes grain to volunteer information that might be actively solicited later on. (Or better yet, badgered from him. Begged for.)  
  
But John was standing against the wall looking so tired, so tarnished — so _happy_. The skin around his eyes and his mouth showed multitudes of fine lines: dehydrated, and pale with the last few days’ lack of rest. But even with his groaning boredom and his restless leg, his lips were soft, not pursed taut, and his shoulders were smoothed down, free of strain. Bone weary, his body daring happiness, and both because of Sherlock, which was — remarkable. And so Sherlock overcame a surprisingly stubborn reluctance, and opened his mouth again, feigning nonchalance as he glanced over at the shipyard.  
  
“Don’t worry, Watson,” he drawled. “I imagine Mrs. Li will be allowed out for lunch any minute now.”  
  
It had the desired effect. John stopped fidgeting, and turned slowly to stare at Sherlock. “Mrs...pardon?” he said, and Sherlock felt a familiar gleefulness run under his skin, tingling high-pitched in his blood. John was always so responsive. Wonderful.  
  
“Mrs. Caldonia Li,” he said, playing at casual surprise. “Though possibly she will not have changed her name with marriage. I hear it’s not normally done in her husband’s country.”  
  
John looked blank for ten, fifteen seconds. Then he tipped his head back, laughing, wry and admiring, and Sherlock was _thrilled_ with himself.  
  
“Caldonia Summerson is _married_ to Mr. Li,” John said, nodding along as if at a tall tale, eyes crinkled at the corners. “Mr. Li from the tea shop. Of course she is, of course. All right Holmes, you blighter, amaze me. How do you know?”  
  
Sherlock cleared his throat, shook his head to wipe some of the silly grin off his face. “Obvious, Watson!” he cried, playing himself like a character on stage, and John grinned, leaning back against the wall to get a better look at him. Sherlock reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out the rice-paper-wrapped tea parcel.  
  
“This,” he said, brandishing the it dramatically, “is a rare delicacy. Honestly, Watson, when this is over I’ll make it for you and you’ll agree. It is a delicacy but it is not, as Mr. Li said himself, one much known or appreciated in England. Not to mention the fact that he had only a small amount of it, less than an ounce, in a purse designed to hold exactly that amount. Not a normal inventory item, then; he told me himself it was a gift from relatives back home. I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with the international news,” he said, with a pointed look at John, “but my dear brother tells me the situation in China is —”  
  
John nodded, and said, “Turbulent.” Sherlock gestured with the parcel again.  
  
“Precisely,” he said. “What might motivate a family in the midst of complete governmental overthrow, dodging the demands of conflicting territorial warlords, to make the effort required to procure and send such a delicacy across two continents? For what occasion would a doting parent send her far-away son a rare tea packaged in the lucky red silk denoting special occasions? Mr. Li’s father is a doctor, which means he might have the funds for such a thing, but not the ready contacts. Only a large event would merit it, a cause for celebration: a wedding, I would say, or the birth of a child.”  
  
John was grinning now, but Sherlock held his hand out again. “But all that would be, essentially, idle speculation,” he said, glancing briefly over at the ship, “if it weren’t for the bill from the —“  
  
“From the what?” asked John, alarmed, as Sherlock took hold of his arm and wrenched him back into the doorway next to the fish-and-chips window. His eyes followed Sherlock’s gaze and saw Callie Summerson’s familiar stocky, brown-clad form making its way down the gangplank, pail and cloths abandoned.  
  
“Doctor,” breathed Sherlock, low in his throat, and felt John give a little shiver before following behind him as he set off after their quarry.

 

***

 

An hour later, John thought to himself that the pursuit, so surprisingly dull throughout most of the morning, had transformed into to one of the strangest he had ever taken part in; and knowing his and Sherlock’s habits, that was saying something. Crouched against the back of another doorway, breathing hard, he reflected on his assumptions. He had always assumed, for example, that the first two rules of pursuing a suspect were: one, to apprehend one’s target as soon as possible; and two, to keep out of sight as much as one could.  
  
Sherlock was apparently playing from a different rule book entirely.  
  
Forty-five minutes ago, for example, as they were trailing Miss Summerson — Mrs. Li, John corrected himself — back past the abandoned ironworks, she had stopped to speak with a woman she seemed to know, who had been walking the other direction. Despite being well back from her, John had automatically slowed, looking around for suitable cover and meandering with Sherlock toward the window of a run-down pawnbroker’s across the street from the ironworks. It was all second-nature, and John was sure they hand’t been observed, so he was quite taken aback when Sherlock leaned close to him and said under his breath, “Cross over and show yourself.”  
  
“Pardon?” John had hissed. “There’s no chance she’s spotted us, we’re —“  
  
“That’s just the point,” interrupted Sherlock. “She has not.”  
  
John stared at him, and then added a small shrugging gesture, but no explanations were forthcoming. “Just go,” said Sherlock after a moment, so John had turned and walked across the street, at a loss to make an action so directly opposed to his training look in any way natural. What impression was he meant to be giving? Sherlock was opaque as ever.  
  
John had reached the other side of the street, still a covert distance away from Mrs. Li, and had glanced back across. Sherlock had begun to wander along his side of the street in the direction of Mrs. Li and her acquaintance, and he looked repeatedly over at John as he did so. John took the hint and meandered along the pavement on his own side, and when they were four hundred yards away from where Mrs. Li stood chatting, he could see her frame stiffen and her head turn to take in Sherlock as well. She had turned, laying a hand briefly on her friend’s arm before she hurried away  down the pavement in the other direction.  
  
So, thought John, running over the day’s events as he caught his breath in the doorway, from then on Mrs. Li had known they were following. Obviously. John wasn’t sure why Sherlock had engineered that little gambit, but it had certainly enlivened their quarry. Her familiarity with the neighborhood worked in her favour; she’d slipped down side streets and through courtyards without seeming to hurry in the least, and it was all John and Sherlock could do to keep her in sight. A time or two they had nearly lost her, and it was down to Sherlock’s keen eyesight picking her out of a crowd, or glimpsing her ducking down an alley, that she didn’t get away. John was not above glaring in Sherlock’s direction whenever they paused to catch their breath, but whenever he did so, Sherlock looked oddly pleased with himself.  
  
Twenty minutes after Sherlock’s revelation they had finally closed the gap, managing to maneuver Mrs. Li out of the back streets and onto the bustling thoroughfare that was West India Dock Road. She hurried officiously onward, putting on a good show of a busy working girl with lunchtime errands to run, but the mens’ strides were longer on the straight of the pavement. She could only bustle so quickly without breaking into a run. They were gaining as they passed a ship-rigger’s shop and a tavern called the Blue Posts, and John was increasing his pace with the intention of putting out a hand to stop the woman, when suddenly Sherlock had cursed and pulled John forcibly back into a side street.  
  
“Dammit, Holmes!” John had panted, hands on knees and leaning against the bricks to catch his breath. “What on earth are you on about?”  
  
“Just ducked out of the bloody pub,” Sherlock said, also out of breath, nodding toward the far side of the alley’s entrance. John followed the trajectory of the nod, and saw the retreating back of a beat constable making his way along the pavement. Then looked back to Sherlock, sure his confusion showed all over his face.  
  
“Holmes, for God’s sake,” John said in a hard murmur, his earlier good humour wholly evaporated. “Aren’t we _trying_ to curtail the girl’s illegal activities? Shouldn’t we,” he gestured hopelessly after the now-distant constable, “be running after him and flagging him down? Why are you shaking your _head_?”  
  
“We’re not,” Sherlock panted, still shaking it, “not trying to turn her over to the police. Certainly not the local police, and not the Yard either if we can help it.”  
  
“We’re not —“ John reigned in his voice, which was threatening to draw attention to them, and continuing in a whisper: “— then what the bloody hell _do_ we want her for? Claiming a dance at the church bazaar?”  
  
“I honestly couldn’t care less what she does, as long as she drops ‘round her mother’s house so the ridiculous woman doesn’t show up again on our doorstep,” said Sherlock, who had regained his breath and was now glancing surreptitiously around the corner of the alley.    
  
John gaped. “You can’t mean that,” he said.  
  
Sherlock hummed, and gestured to John to follow. “Well, I suppose I do also want a look at the letter she has with her.”  
  
“The what? The — no, no, never mind about that; Holmes, have you forgotten the opium smuggling? Hasn’t that been the whole point of this little —”  
  
“Keep your voice down, Watson. And see what you think about the opium smuggling after you talk to Mrs. Li.”  
  
And with that they had been off again. Oddly, Mrs. Li had hardly moved from the position in which they’d last seen her. John registered surprise at this around the time he also noticed that there were policemen _everywhere_. There they were, scattered evenly throughout the neighborhood, patrolling the street-corners and chatting with the workmen outside the ship-building yards. And so the two parties circled each other like dogs through the afternoon alleys of Limehouse.  
  
John wasn’t sure how it would ever end — this bizarre parody of a chase, in which the quarry knew they were closing in but they would never be allowed actually to arrive. Two more times, three, they approached her only to be forced to pull back at the last moment as a constable approached. Mrs. Li had obviously caught onto their game, as she was circling the same heavily-patrolled neighborhood, refusing to be crowded back into the side streets.  
  
It was another hour before the stalemate broke. Sherlock elbowed John in the ribs; pointed a meaningful glance toward the lone constable in sight, then another at Mrs. Li. John nodded, though without complete understanding.  
  
Then in a moment Sherlock had adjusted his posture, his gait, his facial expression. Twenty years added itself in an instant to his frame, and he was bustling stiffly over to the policeman, wearing the smile he used only for pacifying the weak and charming the gullible. Then he started up in his plummiest bewildered tones: all about how he was sure he didn’t know _how_ he’d wandered so far from his inn, he had just stepped out for a breath of fresh air and a cigarette, and had become distracted as one does in his search for an afternoon paper; the constable would have to forgive him as his memory just wasn’t what it used to be but then one did get so _distressed_ reading about the Bolsheviks, one didn’t know what would become of it; that must have been what happened because before he’d known it he didn’t recognise any of his surroundings; well, one supposed it was only to be expected when the last time one was in London was, good gracious, years and _years_ before the War, back in ’08 he thought it had been, and —  
  
It was consummately done. John watched the artist at work, chuckling as the constable was drawn in, as he attempted to interrupt the torrent of potty balderdash raining down upon him. At the same time, out of the corner of his eye, John noticed Mrs. Li drawn into the entertainment as well, and he edged toward her position as surreptitiously as possible. It was in his favour that he and she stood on either side of the pub called Charlie Brown’s, which was just now, around tea time, showing its first signs of life. In the trickle of workers and early-bird patrons, John managed to disguise his progress until he was just behind the woman.  
  
He glanced over at the constable, who now appeared completely caught up in his own exasperation at having to deal with Sherlock. Regretting the moment of fear it would undoubtedly cause her, John eyed the alley behind him, then made a quick grab. He hauled Mrs. Li around and out of sight behind a pile of rusted ship’s parts and a collection of rubbish bins near the pub’s back entrance.  
  
“I’m very sorry,” he hissed into her ear as she struggled and he dragged her backward. “Please believe that we’re not going to hurt you in _any_ way and you must have seen by now that we don’t want to turn you over to the police. I’m sure you don’t want to attract their attention any more than we do.”  
  
She stopped struggling, glaring at him above the pressed flesh of his hand. Slowly, she nodded, staring into John’s wide eyes. He stared back at her and nodded: trustworthy, competent. After a long few moments, he relaxed his grip, stepping back from her a foot or so.  
  
“What do you want then?” she hissed, as soon as John’s hand had left her mouth. “Why’ve you been following me? You want something I’ve got? It’s not prepared; it’s no good to you yet.”  
  
“No, definitely not. I —“ John began, and then had to stifle a giggle at the realisation that he honestly didn’t know. “We — my colleague and I would just like to ask you a few questions,” he said lamely, and she looked about to bolt.  
  
“Questions…about what?” she said, just as another voice rumbled out from the mouth of the alley.  
  
“Your grandmother’s letter, Mrs. Li,” it said. John turned to see Sherlock striding up, his bumbling professorial demeanor abandoned. “Is it back at the shop, or do you carry it with you?”  
  
Caldonia Li seemed frozen in surprise. Then, slowly, her eyes wide, she half-turned from the men, unbuttoned her two top buttons, reached into her bodice and pulled out a sheet of yellowed paper. Sherlock held out his hand.

 

***

 

“It’s not what Yuen — it’s not what my husband likes us to do,” Mrs. Li was saying a few minutes later. The three of them were grouped, still tentative but a bit less tense, in a niche in the alley abutting Charlie Brown’s. They all had lit cigarettes; John was looking around to ensure they were alone. Sherlock turned his scalpel eyes on Mrs. Li, who seemed to have decided that if she was in for a penny where confession was concerned, she was in for a pound.  
  
“I don’t want you thinking bad of Yuen,” she said. “I don’t care much one way or the other, like; it isn’t so bad to do a morning’s cleaning work on a ship and slip a little something out. Before the war it was all on the up and up, but I think I like it better now. You can get twice, three times as much for the same amount, and it’s not just Chinese customers now. We get dons from the school, and writer chaps, and actresses. Yuen — my husband — thinks we ought to get out, just sell the tea, you know, but I honestly don’t mind.” She chewed her lip and John smiled, encouragingly. Somehow, even though he had been the one to accost her and drag her down an alley, she still seemed more inclined to confide in   him than in Sherlock.  
  
“We hear, see, from the sailors” said Callie Li, “when there’s something being held on a ship in harbor, and it’s easier for me to go, being English. Nobody looks twice at a white-skinned girl, and if they do they’re afraid to search me. Could cry bloody murder, couldn’t I, a man feeling all in my clothes?  Used to be, we’d both go, and at night. We’d wait by this wall next to the ship, and there was a system of ropes and pulls, like a code. We’d pull this rope in a certain rhythm, and then someone on the other side would pull it back, and then we’d know after a few minutes we could reel it along and grab the drugs. I liked going together, to be honest. It was a bit like a game.”  
  
John was cringing internally. Her openness, her near enthusiasm struck him as painfully young. It was all a game to her, he thought, listening to her explain the finer points of midnight opium retrieval from the London docks. Just an adventure.  
  
Not that John Watson would know anything about that.  
  
“Was Sussex your idea, then?” Sherlock asked abruptly, and Mrs. Li’s eyes widened for a moment before she nodded.  
  
“I was going through an old trunk of my mum’s,” she said, gesturing with her cigarette at the paper in Sherlock’s hand, “and I found that letter. I don’t know if she’d ever even read it. It was during the — just before my wedding. I was still living at home, but my mum’s husband — we didn’t get on. I was trying to convince Yuen that we should set up business together, like; we’d gone a few times to the docks, but he said he didn’t want to when we were married, he wanted to just sell the tea. But one of our sailors, he was put on a different route, one that went through Brighton. And I thought, here’s a way I could be useful. Not just a show wife, you see? Even if I could only make it up to London every few months, I’d be helping him. And I could have a bit of fun before we both settle down.”  
  
Sherlock, thought John, got a very specific expression when he was thinking up a question that would marshal a witness’s rambling into coherent sense.  
  
“Because Brighton is West Lavington’s nearest port?” he prompted, and Mrs. Li nodded again.  
  
“They’re not forty miles apart,” she said. “And the young people in those little villages are all _dying_ for a bit of fun. I had clients from Crawley and Billingshurt and Amberley, oh, all around. Well, middle-men, I suppose I should say. They’d come buy from me in West Lavington, we’d meet during church services so it all looked respectable, and no one ever noticed. That was my idea, from the letter,” she said, grinning. “And the tea balls, that was so people wouldn’t see right away what we —“  
  
“Had,” interrupted Sherlock. Mrs. Li looked blank. “You said you _had_ clients in Crawley and Billingshurst.” He was watching her carefully.  
  
“Oh, well,” she said, chewing her lip.  
  
“You’re stopping,” Sherlock said. “You’re stopping, now the baby’s coming.”  
  
John was always ready to be impressed by Holmesian deductions, but Caldonia Li _gaped_. Mouth open, eyes wide, glancing down at her corseted waistline.  
  
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sherlock said, following her gaze. “Why else would your husband have a bill from a European doctor? One practicing closer to your mother’s neighborhood than to Limehouse, I might add.”  
  
For the first time since John had dragged her into the alley, Mrs. Li looked frightened. “You’ve seen Yuen?” she asked. “You didn’t — the police, they —“  
  
“No,” said Sherlock. “He merely sold me some rather delicious-smelling cliff tea, and I distracted him while you snuck out the back way.”  
  
She let out a heavy breath, seeming abruptly much older. “It’s just — the police would be so awful just now,” she said. “It’s the only reason he agreed to let me help him. Well, the only reason he agreed to stay in the business at all just now. The Alien Agent’s been around our place, and — I told Yuen, I said they’re not out for the Chinese, they just want to cut down a little on all the Jews. But he won’t listen, and now with the baby — he says you have to be able to show you can support yourself and your family, or they’ll send you away. And the baby and I, he says we’d have to stay. He does decent, like, with the tea, but sometimes money is tight and he — he worries. He hates the police.”  
  
The elaborate dance Sherlock had engineered around the beat constables suddenly made a bit more sense. “It’s all right,” said John. “You’ve got nothing to worry about.” Which was plainly untrue, but, he hoped, comforting nonetheless.  
  
Sherlock snapped Charlotte Whitmore’s letter against his palm. “Mrs. Li,” he said, “We will not report you to the police. Particularly not if your operations in Sussex are at an end.” She smiled, and Sherlock held up a hand. “Neither will we confiscate the opium you are carrying, although I think you should know that going forward, it will be an increasingly unreliable method for avoiding the police.” He thought for a moment. “I’d like to ask two things in return,” he said, and she looked nervous again.  
  
“One,” said Sherlock, counting on his fingers, “I would like to keep this letter, at least for a time. Did you know, by the way, that Charlotte Whitmore is your great-great-grandmother?”  
  
Mrs. Li was surprised twice over by this little speech. “I — no,” she said, “Is she really? I didn’t know. I hope I shan’t be so sad as her.” She was thoughtful for a moment, then shook herself. “And I suppose, yes, I’ve got no real need for the thing.” Sherlock smiled.  
  
“Thank you,” he said, and sounded so sincere that John gave a little start of surprise. “Two,” he went on, “please, _please_ , Mrs. Li, for the love of all you may believe in, pay a visit in the next few days to your sainted mother, or she shall plague me and Doctor Watson here to the ends of the earth.”  
  
Caldonia Li was looking sheepish, blushing and opening her mouth to respond, but Sherlock was already turning to leave. “No, I don’t want to hear it,” he said, sweeping down the alley, as John put out his hand for her to shake. “I’ve no doubt you have every reason to avoid the woman, but she’s a force of nature, she’ll have the police after you by the end of the week, mark my words…”  
  
John looked back for a final glimpse just before he turned the corner. Mrs. Li was sitting on the pile of shipping parts, holding her stomach and laughing.

 

***

 

By the time the cab pulled up outside Baker Street and Sherlock paid it off, John was well and truly exhausted, but also pleased with their day’s work. He dragged up the stairs, noting, at the top of a pile of post, a letter with a London postmark and a return address of 46 Gordon Square. He put his hat on the rack and slumped onto the chaise longue, shutting his eyes for just a moment and noting dimly the sound of Sherlock’s feet bounding up the stairs after him, before all impressions fuzzed out behind his eyes.  
  
When he awoke it was fully dark, and he had a crick in his neck from sleeping at such an awkward angle. Sherlock was sitting across from him, sipping a cup of tea and reading Charlotte Whitmore’s long letter. He looked so at ease, so _lovely_ there in the lamplight, and the melancholy sensation of inaccessible beauty hit John a split-second before he remembered everything that had happened. That Sherlock wasn’t inaccessible. Joy swelled in him. He swung himself off the chaise longue and padded over to Sherlock’s chair, bending over to bury his nose in black curls. Sherlock hummed, reached a hand up to touch John’s face.  
  
“Just regular old Earl Grey?” John asked, moving his face from the top of Sherlock’s head to inhale the tea’s fragrance. “I’m surprised you’re not sampling your new acquisitions.”  
  
Sherlock laid the letter on the side-table and tipped his head back, catching John’s mouth in an upside-down kiss. John smiled around the off-kilter sensation: teeth and tongue at unaccustomed angles, but warm. Perfect.  
  
Sherlock was smiling too, when he disengaged, his look gentle. “Don’t be absurd, John,” he said. “I was waiting for you.” He then seemed to snap out of his quiet mood, slapping the arms of his armchair and bounding to his feet.  
  
“Make yourself comfortable!” he said, stopping to grab the ricepaper parcel from the table as he raced to the kitchen. “You can read Miss Whitmore’s letter, and then we can sample this tea.”

 

***

 

 

**Notes:**

Whoo boy, settle in for some serious notes, people. So many notes, in fact, that I had to insert them in the main body of the chapter.

1\. After thinking about the Orientalist tendencies of the Sherlock episode “The Blind Banker,” I tried very, very hard to make this a realistic and historically accurate portrayal of Limehouse at this time. If I’ve messed it up, please let me know. I am white and have no great experience with Chinese culture, so I’m going off secondhand research.

2\. My primary sources were the Limehouse, Pennyfields and Ming/King Street entries in the [Survey of London](http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=46475), the Wikipedia entry on the [British Chinese](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Chinese), and an oral history account by Annie Lai, a white woman married to a Chinese man, whose story suggested Callie Summerson’s (Oral History, Vol. 14, No. 1 [Spring 1986], pgs. 18-30 - this is available through JSTOR for those with access).

3\. In 1920 through the 1930s, London’s Chinatown straddled West India Dock Road, and was contained mostly on two streets: Limehouse Causeway and Pennyfields Road. Most of the male inhabitants were sailors, with a high concentration of Chinese. When Chinese men married, it was usually to European women, since they seldom had the resources to pay the passage for a Chinese wife.

4\. The first of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu books came out in 1913, and they did much to popularize the stereotype of the evil, enigmatic, dirty and immoral Asian villain, and the debauched excesses of Limehouse. In reality it was just another working-class neighborhood; parts were slum-like and overcrowded, but others weren’t. From the Survey of London: “Pennyfields became a 'sight' for West End society. From the 1890s until the 1920s, parties regularly went east at night, expecting to find the unusual and morally degenerate in Pennyfields. Instead they found a commonplace street (Plate 16b). The Pennyfields of legend was always more exciting than that of reality.” For an image of Pennyfields Road close to Mr. Li’s (fictional) shop during this era, see [here](http://www.british-history.ac.uk/image.aspx?compid=46571&filename=figure0369-016-a.gif&pubid=369).

5\. The detail of the discrepancy between run-down/dirty building exteriors and clean interiors struck me as poignant. From the Survey of London: “As early as the 1920s, many of the houses occupied by the Chinese were described as 'very old and in many cases extremely dilapidated externally'. Internally most were clean, uncrowded, vermin-free and less susceptible to infectious disease than their English neighbours.”

6\. **Drug legislation:** Prior to 1916, opium and cocaine were both readily available in Britain over the counter. During the war, the Home Office passed the Defense of the Realm act, a massive power grab over a wide range of aspects of civilian life (think the US Patriot Act for a modern equivalent). Among many other things, it criminalised possession, distribution, and sale of opium and cocaine except by doctor’s prescription. Their excuse for this was wartime necessity.

Unsurprisingly, as soon as the war was over these changes were made permanent via the 1920 Dangerous Drugs Act. It fully institutionalized what became known as the “British System,” under which certain drugs (now including morphine as well as cocaine and smoking opium - but not laudanum) were illegal unless prescribed by a doctor. Amusingly, up until 1931 one of the legit complaints for which you might be given a prescription for cocaine and/or opium? **Cocaine and/or opium addiction.** Hey, it’s a medical condition!

Anyway, Sherlock’s predictions are, of course, exactly what came true as a result of this law. Opium smoking moved from the collective opium dens to the privacy of peoples’ homes, which in fact played a part in the adoption of recreational drug use by the middle classes. From the Oral History article: “[the law] helped to increase the habit rather than control it. This was achieved by pushing smoking out of the boarding houses and into private houses, thus increasing the number of places where opium could be smoked.”

Meanwhile, the press was having a field day popularizing the notion of opium use as a uniquely Chinese problem. (I won’t even get into the fact that the British are the ones who forcibly expanded opium commerce in China to begin with.)

My point about all this drug legislation stuff is that the culture around opium was a lot different back then, more like the current attitude (at least in Oregon) around marijuana. It was technically illegal, but people who trafficked in it were basically middle-class merchants who had been unable to (or elected not to) abandon their line of business immediately upon the change in the law. (There’s a useful timeline of British drug legislation over [here](http://www.release.org.uk/drugs-law/drugs-through-time)).

7\. The cups of utensils about which John speculates are traditional Chinese tea implements. The blunt pincer tool is used for handling hot cups when you’re rinsing them in hot water; the cup-with-no-bottom is essentially a funnel for putting tea leaves into small-necked teapots; and the tapered utensil is used for unclogging the spout of a teapot or cleaning the leaves out of a vessel after use.

8\. Tea history is full of legends, and it’s often hard to tell them apart from legitimate history. However: the legend about Lapsang Souchang, which forms the base of the Russian Caravan blend, is that it came about through an accident in hurried over-drying of tea leaves over a pine or spruce-root fire. In the estimation of the Chinese farmer this ruined the tea; however, it became extremely popular in Europe, one of the most in-demand preparations.

9\. I am seriously fudging on tea prices. Regular packet tea (not high quality) was selling for around 2 pounds/pound in 1920, so I reckoned 15 times that would be a convincing price for this super-elite wuyi oolong. Fifteen shillings in 1920 is the equivalent of about 20 modern pounds, or 40 US dollars for half an ounce of tea.

10\. Local police versus Scotland Yard: According to Annie Lai, the local police were complicit and/or easily bribable by Limehouse businesses; any raids on the opium sellers and opium dens came from Scotland Yard. However, the local police were notified in advance when the Yard would be running raids, and would, in turn, notify the opium dens and sellers. So basically, police drug raids at this time were more of an inconvenience than anything. More work for everyone, and possibly expensive if you had to dispose of your drugs rather than just hiding them, but no big danger. (NB: the complicity of the local police went both ways; after Annie’s husband died, they viewed her as sexually available. When she eventually did turn to prostitution to support her children, a local police officer was her first client.)

11\. Chinese governance during this period was in chaos: the last imperial Qing monarch had been overthrown (technically allowed to abdicate) in 1912, but imperial and revolutionary powers were continuing to struggle for dominance. Into the breach stepped military warlords who seized de facto control of regions of the fragmented country. The revolutionaries (by that time become Communists and allied with the Soviets) wouldn’t consolidate their power until the late 1920s.

12\. Most of Callie’s confession is inspired by parts of Annie Lai’s oral history transcript about being in the opium business in the 1920s in Limehouse. The big difference is that Annie and her husband never attempted to expand operations, and Annie didn’t have a second “cover” job like Callie does here, so was certainly not at the income level where she was buying pearls and furs. (Callie may be slightly below that level too, but she WANTS to be there, which might be why she's spending the way she is.)

But many elements are the same: working as a cleaning woman on shipboard when she’d heard about a drugs shipment; how guards and police were careful about doing body searches of white women, so once she had the drugs they were unlikely to be found (this actually surprises me, but that’s what she said); the system of rope pulls to signal her contacts on board.

13\. The Aliens Acts of 1905 and 1919 were xenophobic legislation enacted against the influx of Russian and and Polish Jews fleeing Tsarism, whom English authorities blamed for the deteriorating housing and living conditions in the East End of London. Under the Acts, immigrants could be deported if they couldn’t demonstrate that they had means of supporting themselves and their dependents. (Also if the immigrant was classified as a “lunatic”; if they had ever been sentenced in any country for a crime; or if they’d ever been deported under the Aliens Act before). Annie Lai talks in her interview about being sexually blackmailed by an officer of the Aliens Act. More information [here](http://www.20thcenturylondon.org.uk/aliens-acts-1905-and-1919).


	11. Though blind, throbbing between two lives

  


_Settling into Sherlock’s armchair, John read:_

19 August 1851

My dearest girl, 

Today I learned of Manning’s defection from the Church of England, and all through the long twilight I remembered you. 

Let me tell you a tale. You will never read it, but it will pass the time, and I may feel as if I am speaking with you again.

Long ago, they say, on the isle of Crete, there lived young woman named Iphis, who, because her father willed it, was raised as a boy. As a boy she scaled the steep slopes that cradled Cnossos, and as a boy looked out on the deep Aegean. And when she grew to be a young woman (but living still as a young man), she fell in love with the fair Ianthe, daughter of her father’s friend. The poet writes that Ianthe returned Iphis’s love: _herself a maid, she burned with passion for a maid._ But although they kissed among the bowers and the colonnades, Iphis was in despair: being secretly a woman, she and Ianthe could not wed.

One night, therefore, by the light of the full moon, Iphis went with with sacrifices to the temple, and she begged with tears in her eyes for the goddess Isis to make her a man. Isis appeared, and she moved the altars, her horns gleaming bright in the moonlight; and the doors, though stone, shook in their frames. And when Iphis left the temple, she, so late a woman, was made a man.

We are told of the joyous triumph of the groom, indeed of the entire village, when Iphis and Ianthe were wed. How he grasped her beautiful wrists through her veil, as they stood by the side of the bonfire built from her childhood dolls and her dresses. How her mother cut her hair, and her father shook the hand of her betrothed, saying “a dowry of three talents with her,” and _Iphis gained his dear Ianthe_. 

But the poet does not write of the heart of Ianthe, who once burned with passion for a maid.

***

I always told you I hailed from Liverpool, and that much is true. Indeed, you often said that you could hear it in my voice. My father was a linen trader there, and he did well enough that my mother and I never wanted for food or shelter. My father plied his trade with the dressmakers and tailors, and with the sellers of fine household stuffs in town. Twice or thrice a year, he would travel by ferry from Holyhead to Dublin to replenish his stocks, trading with the merchants there in Linen Hall. 

Having known his daughter, it will not surprise you to learn that my father was a jovial, outgoing man. I often witnessed him, when conducting business at home in Liverpool, winning over shopkeeps to such an extent with his good humour and well-told tales, that by the time the notes changed hands they felt it almost a favour to be allowed to purchase his wares. It’s not surprising, then, that he soon had a loyal group of associates in Dublin, just as he had in Liverpool and in London. I heard later, though I never witnessed it, how when the closing bell rang out in the evening over the merchant stalls, and the chamberlain had come round to shut up the linen lockers, the entire riotous group would go out together to sample the local hospitality. My father being what he was, I’d lay odds that rounds were stood in every pub from Church Street to Pill Lane. The next morning he would rise late, and consolidate his purchases. He would catch the last ferry into Holyhead, and travel the final leg by the post coach the following day, arriving home tired and happy.

By the time I was a young woman, my father had known these Dubliners for years, even decades. There were many among them whom he counted personal friends. When they traveled to England they would often stay in our home. I remember sitting by the fire as the evening stretched on, drinking in their tall tales and companionable chatter, as my customary bed-time came and went. These were, generally speaking, not the frugal, abstemious Protestants one might find in Belfast and the cities of the North, but ribald Catholics, often middle children, the passingly successful sons of farmers who toiled on the land outside Dublin. Most sent money home to support their parents, or keep their younger brothers and sisters in school. But still, when the blight descended, or the landlords raised the rent, their families struggled. 

It was the stories of the sisters which caught at me, and which refused to release me. Sitting by the family hearth, still in my short skirts, with _Waverley_ on my knees and the mens’ tales in my ears, I felt my heart rise up. The stories were eerily similar to one another, be they told of a sister, or a cousin, or a friend. A young woman who left her home to take a factory job in London. Who arrived in the city to find that the position was a fiction; or who took the job only to be injured and dismissed; or who sickened under the strain of the long work days and had to give them up. And then my father’s friends would find out later — sometimes six months later, or a year — that their sisters and their sisters’ friends had no position, no name, no reputation. They were fallen women.

And oh, my love, you would rail against me, but it is true: I was ashamed to be English. For I heard from these hearty, well-met men, these friends of my father’s, how their uncles would wish to go into law, or government, but could not. Or how their brothers, recently home from the Royal College of Agriculture, tried to implement more modern methods of farming, but their English landlords would not see the sense of making the investment. And the sisters, the daughters of those families passed reproachful before my English eyes, and I saw that there but for the grace of Parliament went I. 

_John looked up for a moment, rubbing at his forehead as Sherlock settled across from him with teapot and cups. There was a trace of a ghost in his eyes, and when Sherlock looked at him, head on one side, and said “John?” he shook his head._

_“I was standing with Daniel once,” said John, “just before his injury, on the edge of a lime pit. We were looking down on the corpses of his school friends piled ten deep, and he told me that I oughtn’t to look so sad.”_

And so [wrote Miss Whitmore] comes the part of my life you never knew: how, with a few books and fewer dresses, the skirts let down a few years before, I left my parents’ house and traveled to London. I went alone, unguarded, against my parents’ wishes but with their grudging consent. I was eager and untested. I was full of the desire to save these fallen women, the daughters of my father’s friends. 

I shudder to remember my own innocence, then. For what did I imagine I had to offer the women of Holywell Street? I discovered quickly enough, indeed, that they were better off than I; for whereas I had only my meager savings from a discontinued allowance, they had a steady stream of income. Whereas I found myself alone in a large an unfamiliar city, they enjoyed the company of others in the same occupation. Whereas I feared to step out lest I be menaced, they had an unaccustomed freedom, and the ability to frequent the convivial public houses that respectable women shunned. Their hours and their workloads were less than than what they had sometimes suffered at factory jobs; and many of those who did not fall ill even succeeded in marrying, after a time.

For all my lofty ambitions, then, I was more in need of help than the women I had come to save. I had learned enough of my father’s trade to secure, after some effort, a position in a shop selling broadcloth and linens. So, too, I was able to find a boarding house catering to young working women, not far from my place of employment. But my hours were long, and I was unaccustomed to working for my living. Finding my own way about these things left me little time for fraternising with the ladies of the evening. 

More than anything, and this I had not expected, I was so horribly lonely. I could go a month, even two, having no more nourishing interaction with another human being than selling woolens to a string of housekeepers and newlyweds; and handing the rent to my land-lady every Monday morning. I had been accustomed to being the center of a boisterous, if small, family, and the companion of our many acquaintances. Now I was alone. And though my parents knew where I was (if not precisely my intentions), we had argued so strenuously over my decision, that I was loathe to write to them and tell of anything less than shining triumph.

_“Do you suppose everyone is idiots at nineteen?” John asked, and Sherlock considered for a moment, swirling the tea-water in the small clay pot. His eyebrows drew together.“Well,” said John, “the great Sherlock Holmes excepted, of course.”_

_“Oh John,” said Sherlock, ruefully, still swirling the pot. “By no means should you exclude me.”_

So that [wrote Miss Whitmore] when I was finally able to carve out some few hours to spend on my supposed mission of charity in Holywell Street, I came more as a supplicant than as an angel of mercy. I am, I think, friendly enough, able to charm when I desire; but in all my life I can hardly remember a more awkward, abashed time than those first few days I spent attempting to strike up conversations there. And the women I met were — bemused, I think, at my bedraggled attempts to befriend and pity them. They tried at first to ignore me, then ridiculed and questioned me by turns. It would have been easier, I expect, if I had allowed _them_ to pity _me_. As it was I held myself ever apart, even as I became a frequent feature in their midst. 

I believe they looked on me, in the end, as a kind of curiosity. Lucy and Amanda, the two women with whom I was closest, would sometimes send me out on errands when they had an unexpected caller; or they would take me to a public house, where I would sip for hours from my single glass of ale while they bought each other round upon round; or we would sit in Amanda’s parlour, drinking tea and laughing together. If I am honest, often they would laugh _at_ me. And they would ask me about my aims in frequenting such neighborhoods. I think I realised, by then, that I had been a bit ridiculous. I no longer attempted to convert or rescue my friends, but merely basked in the human contact they allowed me. 

I basked, too, in the luxuriance of their physical presence. You would snarl at me (so lovely, your snarling lips!), but I did not know you then. And Amanda, in particular, was very beautiful, tall and fair, with that beauty of gold and rose-painted china that one sees in Botticelli frescoes. And a bit of their sadness, too, about her eyes. 

They were both orphans, Lucy and Amanda. And while Lucy was still sending money every month to her younger sister, Amanda had only herself to support. Her rooms, therefore, were much pleasanter than mine or even Lucy’s, warmer and less spartan, and one night in December she and Lucy were teasing me that I had befriended them with the sole purpose of obtaining shelter out of the cold. I blushed and stammered in my haste to deny it, ashamed because I knew I really _was_ nearly out of coal and had no money to buy more; and they laughed, as at a younger sister. And then Lucy said, perhaps my cunning was so great that I had planned to seduce Amanda, and pass the entire night in her rooms. 

It was an off-hand remark, but my confusion and perturbation increased. I knew not what to think, as I had never heard the language of seduction applied to two girls. And at the same time, in a general way, I had often thought of Amanda. Of how I should like to be somehow _closer_ to her, of determining with my hands the textures of her fine, translucent skin. Amanda and Lucy were laughing still, but Amanda looked over at my face and abruptly stilled. My looks, I suppose, had gone from flustered to truly distressed, and her disposition was teasing, but not unkind. Lucy was slower to stop laughing, and did so only when Amanda put out an arm to still her friend. Then Amanda changed the subject to something banal, some political scandal which had been in the papers, and which had slightly affected the business dealings of one of her clients. I felt so grateful to her, and yet — so curious. If the conversation had continued, perhaps…perhaps.

_There was a burbling sound; John looked up. Sherlock was upending the tiny pot over one small cup, then the other, and back again. Their china-white interiors filled with rich amber. Sherlock held up a finger, raised one tiny cup to his nose, closed his eyes and inhaled. Then he flicked his eyes up to John, and smiled._

Weeks went by [wrote Miss Whitmore], months even, of stealing time with the two of them on my mornings and afternoons off, and occasional rare evenings when neither of them were working or otherwise engaged.. It was spring, and warmer, and light late into the afternoon, when I found myself alone one evening with Amanda. Lucy had been invited by another friend of hers to take in a show. Amanda and I were sitting in her rooms, with the windows open to admit the breeze. She was in a lively, generous mood, and had given me wine to drink, to which I was not accustomed. 

I felt so giddy, yet so contented there, far removed from the shop and the crowds and even the usual banter between Amanda and Lucy, from which I was always a bit excluded. And so I lost track of the glasses I had drunk. I lost track, even, of the conversation Amanda was attempting to carry on with me, and I can only imagine that the wine was at fault when I interrupted her mid-sentence and confessed, without the slightest preliminary, how I still thought about what Lucy had said that night the winter before. I think I stuttered; I realised dimly I should be mortified, and was indeed very nervous at what I had said. But Amanda only looked at me, and smiled a little. 

“Lucy was teasing me,” she said. “She knows my — when she met me I was living with another woman. It is — not uncommon, here.”

I am laughing at myself as I recall this conversation. Good Lord, I was so earnest. “Like the Ladies of Llangollen?” I remember asking. It had heard, somewhere, of my childhood hero Walter Scott once visiting the spinsters at their home in Wales.

“Somewhat,” she said, smiling a little. But then she added: “At least, so I believed at the time.”

_Sherlock came around the back of the armchair, tiny cup of tea in hand. He bent down and ran his tongue along the edge of John’s ear before holding the liquid under John’s nose. Obediently, John inhaled: it was earthy without being dark; there was a musk, but also something like flowers. John made a noise of appreciation in his throat, and went to take the cup, but Sherlock set it down on the side table. “Wait just a moment,” he whispered in John’s ear, “until it cools.”_

I asked her [Miss Whitmore wrote] what had happened to her friend, and Amanda answered that the woman had received an offer of marriage: a _real_ offer of marriage, and had accepted. “Needs must,” Amanda said. “She was getting on, and wanted a steady income in her old age.” 

Oh, I was so sincere, and so awkward, and by this stage I really was quite drunk. I put down my wine glass on the side table and moved closer to her on the couch where we were sitting, and I told her I could scarcely imagine having the chance to live with _her_ , and giving it all up to marry a man. I put out my hand, and touched her skirts and her leg under them, but her hand came out to clamp down on my wrist. 

“You ought not,” she said, in warning, gritting her teeth. 

It was bitterly disappointing. After so many months without real human touch, to be scorned so soon. The wine made me both reckless and demonstrative; tears rose in my eyes, and through them I sniffled, “It’s just that I wanted to touch you.” She said, “You’ve drunk too much wine.”

I told her, crying into my handkerchief, that that was true, but that I thought about her all the time, every day, and had only started drinking her wine a few hours before. Then — I think she was trying to embarrass me a little, or show me I didn’t truly know what I was asking, because her hand tightened around my wrist and wrenched it behind my back, and suddenly I was pinned down against the couch, with her body pressed over me, and she said, fierce, almost angry-sounding, “Is this what you wanted, then?” 

_“John,” said Sherlock softly, and John looked up from the letter with a start. Sherlock was sitting across from him on the chaise longue, smirking slightly. Sherlock gestured toward the side table and said, “Your tea is ready to drink.” John let out a quick laugh. “You knew exactly where I’d read to, didn’t you?” he said, but Sherlock just looked pointedly at the teacup. John raised it to his lips and read on, the taste of dark earth on his tongue and just a hint of caramel at the back of his throat._

I think she’d expected me [wrote Miss Whitmore] to draw back, or exclaim in pain. But you would be unsurprised (if livid) to learn that my impulse was instead to melt under her hands. I cannot recall if I even managed to summon speech; if I did, it was decidedly in the affirmative. In any case, the feeling of me going limp beneath her, and likely crying out in surprised approval, caught her off-guard. She sat back upright, releasing me, though I could do nothing except continue to lie back, my head spinning.

“I see,” she said. We remained in silence on her couch for several minutes. 

In the end she sent me off home that night, tipsy and tingling with the prints of her hands. She paid for a hansom cab, and told me we would talk the next day, that we could forget all the events of that night, if I decreed it so. 

But of course, I did not so decree. And now you know, what you sometimes asked and I refused to answer, how I came to be so familiar with the speech and actions of female intimacy. She taught me her tricks, and thoroughly (as she often claimed in her more melancholy moments) corrupted me, but more than that she was kind to me, touched me, gave me pleasure and let me give some back to her. 

I did not enter her profession, but kept my hours at the linen shop; nor did I move my scant possessions to her flat, as she used it so often for her work. But we spent all the time together we could. I was awash in love and gratitude, and for nine months I was the happiest I had ever been. I built castles in the sky on the strength of Amanda. I thought of moving away from the city with her, of buying a farm. I even started writing once more to my parents, so flush with my own happiness that I could make my drab linen-seller’s life into something vivid for their benefit.

She waited until three weeks before her wedding to tell me, that she was leaving me as her friend had once left her: for a marriage to a former client with a steady income. I refused to believe it, of course. I screamed and I wept. But she told me I should have realised; she had always said I was too much the Romantic.

_Sherlock came back around the side of the armchair, refilling John’s cup with a second steeping of the amber liquid from his small earthen pot. He stood by, empty teapot in one hand, other hand on the armchair’s back, the sole of one bare foot pressed against the other ankle. Like a dancer, John thought, and then thought again, “always said I was too much the Romantic.” When John raised the little cup to his lips again the taste was slightly stonier, and there was the faintest hint of something deep within it, sweet and acidic like a fruit._

So that when I arrived in West Lavington years later [Miss Whitmore wrote], on orders from a contact of Lucy’s who had devoted himself to the cause of Irish independence, I thought myself hard. I was an old maid, with a broken heart and years of devoted work for a cause in which I believed. It mattered not to me if I were arrested on charges of gross indecency, or executed for treason, or whether I lived out the rest of my days buried in West Lavington, fetching and carrying for my sickly Henfield aunt. It hardly even mattered, though I told myself it did, that Manning should be elected Archdeacon. Nothing truly reached me; I’d had, I thought, my one great love, and I never dreamed that she would shrink, that she would wither and pale, in comparison to you.

***

Tonight I thought of you, my Iphis, and of who I was to you. I long so much, my darling, to be merely the Ianthe who loved you, and whom you loved. I try to remember only your shining eyes as you looked at me, as you leaned to kiss me with your dimpled honey mouth and your look of deviltry. 

But I was also, was I not, the father of Ianthe, who held out a hand and sold my love cheap for a handful of coins? I used you, for cover and disguise, and still not a day passes in which I do not question my decision. My plan, from the beginning, had been to blacken my own character, and to disguise my true intentions, by making out my coded missives were love letters. But even so, I could have written such letters which were not drawn from life. I could have made them up out of my head. It was only that once I met you — once I loved you — I could hardly fathom a love letter written to anyone else. Had I loved you less, perhaps I would have loved you better.

Also, and perhaps worst of all, I was Isis to you. For I wrote you, so lately female, into a male. I told myself I did so to keep you safe, and it was a strong argument. It almost wins me over even now. In the eyes of the world, should they have found my letters where they nestled in the north pew, I must have been the scarlet woman, corrupt and unnatural, the seductress Eve. And you must have been everything that in reality you were not: a meek and passive fellow, never acting on his own, done in by my charms. And they would never find you. It was safe thus; or so I told myself.

But after you told me in the dark by the Cowdray Ruins that I made you wish you were a man, though before you had always congratulated yourself on your sex, I could not help a twinge of guilt whenever I wrote to you. I would remember how you held me up that June night against the ruined wall, pressed hard against me, and when a night coach rattled by on the hard-packed road, the words spilled from you, wild: how if you were a boy you would run down the hill and overtake it. You would commandeer it for us, you said, posturing in the dark as if you held a pistol; and you would drive us, all through the night and the day, stealing fresh horses when ours tired, to Gretna Green. I remembered how the words came faster as you held me up, pressed into me against the stone: how if you were a man you could make your living by your Gypsy looks, telling fortunes or stealing horses or even opening a respectable shop. It hardly mattered what you did, you said. Only that (your hands pressing under my skirts, leaving me shuddering) as a man you would bind me; you would keep me; I would be yours.

But my Iphis, my love, what have I done? I never wanted you as a man. 

For the poet writes that 

_Iphis follows her, her companion as she goes, with longer strides than she had been wont_

and I see you still in my mind’s eye in the moonlight, running down the garden in your dew-drenched slippers, your bustling steps set close together, and I can never bring myself to wish them farther apart. Or again, he tells us that

_her fairness does not continue in her face_ ;

and if by fairness is meant white-blond locks and rose-pink skin, then you were never fair. But if by fairness is meant olive and almond in the hollows of your eyelids and the crook of your elbow, kissing your sun-warmed skin until I reeled and was drunk with you, then oh, you were the fairest creature I could imagine. And I would not lose you.

And the poet says that

_both her strength has increased, and her features are more stern_ ;

but I fear to think, even after so many years, of you any stronger, any sterner than you showed yourself the few times I tried to hint anything against your Queen or your Church. I do not fancy myself a timid woman, but oh you were fearsome in your fury, and I could not have said if my surrender was born more of fear, or more of awe-struck love. And he writes that 

_shorter is the length of her scattered locks_

but I remember your lovely black curls, when I loosened your plait in a curtain down your back, and lifted it to kiss down your spine. Short? Scattered? How so cruel? I could never wish it, never.

But what a reprehensible love letter this has been. I’ve spent pages telling  you (though of course you shall never read them) about a former flame, a thought no lover relishes. It is only that — I wish you could have known it all, when we were still side by side. I wish I had never let you believe I wanted you different than you were. I wish I could have trusted you, and told you. I wish I could have lived a life with you, you and your terrifying tempers and your scolding looks, and the soft curves of your hips in my hands. 

Oh, my Caldonia, how sorry I am. Yet somehow I remain, even now,

Your,  
Charlotte Whitmore

***

_John blinked twice. He set the letter down. Sherlock still stood, teapot in hand, knee bent and foot against ankle, and John reached out one hand without looking. Sherlock stepped forward, and took it, and John squeezed hard._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Charlotte is using Henry T. Riley’s translation of the _Metamorphoses_ , which she must have purchased hot off the presses; it came out in 1851. Text is [here](http://books.google.com/books?%20id=bilA7lK6HI8C&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q%20=iphis&f=false); the story of Iphis and Ianthe is the last fable in the ninth book. Charlotte made some key changes to the text to suit her purposes.
> 
> 2\. Ancient Greek [wedding rituals](http://ablemedia.com/ctcweb/consortium/%20ancientweddings3.html) included a ceremony in which the bride made offerings of her childhood toys, dolls, and clothing. This was called _proteleia_ , and signified her entrance into a new, adult life as a married woman. It was also meant to appease the dieties of marriage and childbirth, and ease her transition.
> 
> In another part of the ceremony, the bridegroom and father of the bride exchanged ceremonial words that transferred the bride from one to the other: “I give you this girl, that she may bring children into the world within the bond of wedlock.[…] I agree to provide a dowry of three talents with her.”
> 
> There was also a leaving procession; from the source above:  
> 
>
>> The procession itself began with the painful ritual departure, a drama of the pain the bride felt leaving her family. The groom grabbed her wrist while the bride's father delivered her to her husband's control, saying "in front of witnesses I give this girl to you for the production of legitimate children." After this, the bride was treated as a symbolic captive, and to her the procession reflected a crisis that needed to be endured and overcome, as it was her final transition from childhood to marriage.
> 
> 3\. You can read more about Dublin’s Linen Hall [here](http://www.herald.ie/entertainment/%20hq/the-very-fabric-of-dublins-past-1469127.html). By Charlotte’s childhood in the 1810s, this particular trading centre would have been in decline, in the process of being replaced by the Belfast Linen Hall (closer to the actual centers of linen production in the north of Ireland). Mr. Whitmore, though, was probably loathe to abandon his Dubliner contacts to start over in another location.
> 
> 4\. Charlotte was ahead of her time in her reforming zeal, but “saving the fallen women of London” became a fairly prevalent middle-class hobby during the mid- and late-Victorian years. I’m trying to encapsulate the middle-class view in what she remembers hearing of these women’s stories before arriving in London, and the working-class view in what she actually finds. From [this source](http://www.english.uwosh.edu/roth/Prostitution.htm):
>
>> [The] health [of prostitutes] was generally superior to other working women, who suffered under 14 hour workdays. They had a higher standard of living than others of a similar class background; they had money, clothing and could afford their own rooms. They also had access to the pub, which served as a center of social and political life, but was off limits to the virtuous woman. Prostitution offered the young woman more independence, economically and socially, than could otherwise be available to her.
>
>> > The only condition that seemed to dispose a woman to prostitution was economic relocation. If a woman was separated from her community and then lost her job, prostitution may have seemed the most favorable option. Statistically, most prostitutes were from poor families and were 1/2 orphans, having one deceased parent. They would be expected to be able to support themselves as the family was rarely in a position to support them. It was becoming more common generally that young woman could be expected to be economically independent. They would have taken jobs that had forced them to relocate, generally to more urban areas, either because of family conflict or economic necessity.
>
>> > Contrary to the Victorian literary myth of the fate of the fallen woman, prostitution was, and still is, a transitional occupation for primarily working class woman in their early 20's. As long as she had the choice as to when to quit, her future would not be appreciably limited. Most prostitutes would change occupations and "settle down," many marrying former clients.
> 
>   
> 5\. The [Ladies of Llangollen](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladies_of_llangollen) were a famous, aristocratic female couple: Eleanor Charlotte Butler and Sarah Ponsonby. They were essentially wealthy and upper-class enough to fly completely in the face of convention, running away together and setting up house in Wales in the late eighteenth century. They became something of a tourist attraction for the British Romantics: Walter Scott, Percy Shelly, Lord Byron and William Wordsworth all paid them visits. 


	12. Only you and I together (epilogue)

Monday, 20 June 1920

Charleston Farmhouse, Sussex

Maynard,

I have been out painting with Duncan most of the day and have only now discovered your telegram. What on earth do you mean, you are back in London? We have been expecting you for three days; when will you arrive?

You are in danger of encountering utter pandemonium if you don’t come down soon. Virginia has locked herself away, wrapped up in the planning for the new book about Thoby, and Sebastian is mooning about at loose ends without you. You can imagine the irritability of a Duncan who was promised the opportunity to play you and Lytton off one another, and is now deprived of you both. (And what, pray tell, is Lytton about? Sebastian says the both of you spent the weekend not fifty miles from here, in West Lavington. Is he still with you? I am utterly perplexed.) I am left with Leonard, who teases me, and the boys, who tease each other. Honestly, without you here I am the most organised member of our little band, a fact which makes me laugh even as I write it. Come and relieve me, so that I may run off with Duncan and finish the plantings on the west side; and start the painting of the potting-shed door, the one with the lovely antique lock.

It seems you have become enamoured extremely quickly of this Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson, and Sebastian even hints at some entrancing tale to be told. By all means, bring them along, Maynard. Clive and Mary are off on a tour of the Continent, and there will be a free guest room for six weeks at least. Only do hie yourself to Charleston, for goodness’ sake, before I despair of this whole menagerie.

Yours,  
Vanessa

  


***

  


It was the pale citrus glow of sunlight just past dawn, on the eastern face of Charleston Farmhouse: the tableau shimmered in the bare morning. A woman in flowing cream and a large floppy hat sat behind an easel, facing the house, which was surrounded by a riot of ivy, pinks, and salvia. The scene glowed; and her canvas glowed, bold luminous strokes and blocks of colour. But in her canvas, just off-center, a dark shape rounded out the composition. It showed nowhere in the scene before her, and without it, once one knew to compare, the cottage lacked a dimension — a depth of purple.

The door clicked open, the creak carrying muffled through the morning air. Keynes stepped out carrying tea in two cups, and padded over to set one down by her side. He stood in silence for minutes. The birds croaked and trilled from the walled garden behind them, and from the orchard to their left. Vanessa sighed, set down her brush on the shelf of her easel. She picked up her tea, sipped it. Broke the silence, softly.

“It’s my favorite time of day,” she murmured. “Before all the bustle begins.”

“I thought you were eager to start on the potting-shed door,” he said, equally quiet, looking from her canvas to the cottage and back.

“Mm,” she said. “But I can do that with everyone about. This is more…solitary.”

“You don’t have to be, you know — the menagerie’s nursemaid, when I’m not here. If everything goes to hell, it won’t be your fault any more than anyone else’s.”

“Will I ever believe that, do you suppose?” She sighed and sipped her tea, looking at the house. “I don’t know if Virginia and I will ever truly overcome our mother’s training. Helping the men and all that.” A pause, then: “She’s writing about Thoby, you know,” nodding at the dark shape on the canvas.

Keynes cleared his throat. “So you said.”

They sat in silence for a moment. “It makes me think of him, again,” said Vanessa, looking toward the house as if she could see the purple shadow reemerge from the doorway.

“I think that summer,” said Keynes, thoughtfully, “was the last time I saw him, alive,” and Vanessa picked up her brush, daubed idly at a spot just to the right of the figure. Didn’t answer.

“Well,” she said at last. “It seems everyone has someone to mourn, these days.” She smiled softly up at Keynes. “I’m glad you’re here, at least.”

His chuckle barely broke from his throat. They breathed, remembering together in the cool morning air.

“And did your guests arrive safely last night?” she said, a bit of the ordinary world returning to her voice. “I was sound asleep.”

“They’re in the far guest room,” he said, gesturing to the north end of the wall with his tea-cup, and when she raised her eyebrows he added, “Oh _come_ now,” with a roll of the eyes. “Lytton and I didn’t go to all the trouble of egging them on all throughout our West Lavington adventure, and then writing to bring them out from London, only to put them in separate _rooms_.”

Her laugh was an earthy, vigorous sound, and the presence of the dead was suddenly less palpable. “Oh, in that case,” she said, wiping her eyes and slapping the arms of her garden chair as she rose to her feet. “You shall have to tell me every juicy detail.” She took his arm, companionable, rooted again, and Keynes smiled.

“But I couldn’t possibly do it justice without Lytton here to help me along,” he said, and she laughed again, almost interrupting: “Oh yes,” she assured him. “We shall all wait for Lytton.”

  


***

  


John awoke in a patch of butter-bright sunlight, wrapped tightly in Sherlock’s limbs and Vanessa’s parti-colored quilts. For a moment, before he remembered, he was disoriented; then he relaxed back into Sherlock’s chest with a sigh almost of disbelief. A week ago he’d never heard of Lytton Strachey or Vanessa Bell, and had been trying not to notice that he’d fallen in love with Sherlock Holmes. And now…now. These, circling him, were Sherlock’s sleeping sunlit arms.

Through the open window filtered faint birdsong and the fainter ripple of human voices — a man’s and a woman’s. But surely it must still be very early, John thought drowsily, blinking at the long pale shadows on the wall. He stretched the mild ache from his left leg, which had been trapped in stasis between Sherlock’s thighs, and Sherlock made a petulant noise and pulled John closer. John could feel his own helpless grin.

But he could also feel the need to use the WC. Gently he twisted out of Sherlock’s grip, slowly enough that he could ease his lover back onto the sheets. Sherlock grunted softly and gathered John’s pillow to his chest. John levered himself off the mattress and onto his feet, and then stood looking down on Sherlock. 

For a moment his breath caught, though the sight was anything but unexpected, and Sherlock was hardly looking his most glamourous curled around John’s abandoned pillow, his cheek mashed toward his nose in a way that made him look strangely childlike. There were indentations on his forehead and cheek where the sheets had wrinkled beneath him, and his curls were a wild tangle around his face. The tenderness that welled up in John felt like tears.

He shook himself, and padded out the door and down the hallway. The house had recently been fitted with indoor plumbing. John was grateful for it: in addition to the convenience, he still felt a bit too tenderised by sleep and new love to face chatting to his hosts. Keynes had been his familiar, jovial self when he had met their late train the night before, slinging their bags into Clive’s ancient Santler motorcar, and keeping up a steady chatter as they trundled along the darkened roads; but everyone else had already retired by the time they’d arrived. John and Sherlock had had just about enough energy to note a few glimpses of mullioned French doors, and murals in peach and rust; to raise their eyebrows when Keynes, looking delighted with himself, insisted on putting them together in the same room; and to bring each other off quickly with their hands, before falling into deep slumber.

Now, as John shut the door of the WC behind him again with a faint click, he reflected that it was still early enough to return to bed; he wouldn’t be rude if he avoided the rest of the group for a few hours longer. Given Keynes’s and Strachey’s propensity for gossip, he thought to himself, as he passed a tottering pile of mail on a side table by the front door, everyone probably knew all about him and Sherlock anyway. It wouldn’t hurt if he —

Something in his mind echoed, and he backtracked to the small table. It held four days’ worth of three different newspapers; John helped himself to the _Evening News_ before looking through the letters. The envelopes, in particular. Hadn’t Strachey said…an envelope. John found a letter addressed to Vanessa’s husband Clive, whom Strachey had said was away on a Continental tour. He grinned, the paper in his hand and the letter in the pocket of his dressing-gown as he walked back down the hall. Upon arriving at the room he fetched his cigarette lighter and melted a bit of the wax on the letter’s seal, then fiddled with the door for a moment before closing it softly behind him, and returning to bed.

  


***

  


“And _didn’t_ you?” said a trim man in his mid-thirties, smoking a cigarette with a certain insouciance and laughing into Keynes’s eyes. The five of them were scattered on chairs, benches and grass outcroppings in the walled garden by the reflecting pool — which, however, was not yet reflecting anything, being devoid of water and only half-tiled. The place was nevertheless an extremely pleasant setting in which to regale one another with the exploits of the last few days.

“Yes, I would’ve thought you’d be shot off the mark, Maynard,” chimed in Vanessa, a bit distractedly, staring around the garden for her sons.

“Exactly _why_ , Vanessa,” spluttered Keynes, “you and Duncan assume I am somehow irresistibly drawn to Lytton’s past conquests, I can’t —“

“You wonder why that is, do you, Maynard?” asked Strachey, sitting forward in his chair like King Solomon delivering a judgment, and mocking up a face of deep consideration. “Let’s think. I trust you’ve forgotten dear Hobby, he was so dreadfully long ago, and after all I had only proposed to him a short time before when you —” 

“Oh for goodness’ sake, Lytton.”

“Ah, ah,” said Strachey, holding up a finger, “best not to interrupt a lengthy recital in progress. Who came next? Norton, was it? The golden fresher of our waning years? Or could it have been —“

“This is about to get a bit awkward,” murmured Vanessa aside to Sebastian Sprott, but she was smiling behind her cigarette. “You don’t take it _per_ sonally, do you?”

“Oh lord, I’d’ve buggered off long ago,” said Sprott, then coughed. “So to speak,” he said, and Vanessa was struck by a fit of the giggles.

“Norton?” Keynes was exclaiming. “It was _I_ who introduced him to _you_ , Lytton.”

“I don’t recall you introducing me to him _biblically_ ,” retorted Strachey, his voice climbing. “We weren’t _in flagrante_ at the time, were we? Was I quite drunk?”

Keynes scowled at this. “In any case,” he said, lowering his voice, “do you really want to have this conversation in — in — present company?” He tipped his head to indicate Duncan Grant’s laughing eyes.

“Don’t you _dream_ of having it anywhere else!” yelled Grant, delighted. “It was the prospect of witnessing _precisely_ this conversation that persuaded me to cut short my time in Italy.” He caught Vanessa’s eye, then amended to: “Well, that and the heat.” She raised an eyebrow. “And I, um, I was getting a bit bored of a boy.” She laughed. Strachey tutted. Keynes rolled his eyes.

“Oh lord,” Grant said a second later, looking stricken, “Have I just admitted I’d rather listen to the bickering of my former lovers than copulate with a twenty-one-year-old Italian? Am I ancient? Does this signal my descent into decrepitude?” By this point Sprott and Keynes were throwing clots of grass at him, and Grant was laughing so hard that he tipped over onto the lawn and couldn’t continue.

“Right, yes, _point taken_ ,” said Keynes, laughing at last along with the rest of them as Grant rolled around in the grass.

“But honestly, Maynard,” pressed Grant, recovering a bit but still chuckling. “You didn’t even try? Is he unsightly? I’ve yet to get a decent look at him.”

“He’s _lovely_ ,” said Strachey and Vanessa in unison, which sent Grant into another round of hysterics and started Keynes scowling again. “He _is_ , Maynard,” argued Vanessa, indignant, with a hiccup. “You can hardly argue it away. Blond hair, sandy skin…military bearing…and the way he stood up to Ralph…” she trailed off, dreamy-eyed.

“For one thing,” said Keynes, in the tone of a man staking out the moral high ground, “Sebastian is sitting _right here_ , if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, please, no worries on my account,” said Sprott, grinning and waving his cigarette. Keynes turned his scowl in that direction instead.

“And there is nothing _objectionable_ about John Watson,” he went on, “but for god’s sake, the man is next door to shell-shocked and madly in love with someone else.”

“Hm,” said Vanessa, with a mischievous glance at Grant. “Why did neither of those things deter _you_ , Lytton?”

“Yes, Lytton,” said Grant, sitting up abruptly and grinning, “why didn’t _you_ hesitate to bed the love-sick war veteran?”

Strachey glared. “Was it or was it not you, Duncan Grant,” he said witheringly, and Vanessa was already snickering again, “who once opined that you should be given a medal for single-handedly succoring the English troops?” Grant was giggling now as well, and when Keynes said “I heard it wasn’t exactly single _-handed_ ,” Strachey actually threw his head back and guffawed.

“Besides,” Strachey panted, having collected himself, “ _I_ believe the only thing keeping Maynard away from Watson was that he preferred Holmes.”

“Lord yes, he’s stunning,” agreed Vanessa.

“You _quite_ hold your own in these conversations,” observed Sprott to her, aside, sounding impressed. She bent to light another cigarette. “I’d die of loneliness if they all shut up around me the way they do around Virginia,” she said. “I don’t have many women friends. I’ve had to learn the knack.”

“If she’s telling you it doesn’t come naturally,” piped up Grant, “don’t believe her, Sebastian. She’s broken as many hearts as anyone here.”

“The salient _point_ ,” interrupted Strachey, who tried never to dwell long on female heartbreakers, “is how neatly it all came together. I do believe that if I _hadn’t_ seduced Watson, or if Maynard _had_ , things wouldn’t have gone off nearly so satisfactorily. Gives one hope for love.”

“Yes, very selfless of you, Lytton,” said Grant, rolling his eyes, and Keynes chuckled, and added “Always making sacrifices for your fellow men.”

Strachey groaned and the others laughed, and the sounds of their conversation carried over the garden’s wall and across the graveled paths to the pinks and the ivy outside the northeast bedroom, where two young boys were huddled together, whispering.

  


***

  


John sat in the chair by the window as the sun climbed higher in the sky, glancing idly from the paper on his knee to Sherlock’s sleeping form. It wasn’t unusual for Sherlock to make up for lost sleep after a case, and John reckoned that he’d had minimal rest in the last forty-eight hours. 

Besides, this had never before been so explicitly permitted: to watch the quick, furtive movements of Sherlock’s eyes behind his translucent lids; to run a hand through Sherlock’s tumbled curls as the sun pulled out auburn from the black; to track the changing angle of the shadows Sherlock’s eyelashes cast on his cheekbones. To be so permitted, so _welcomed_ — John felt a little drunk.

It was the smell of cigarette smoke wafting through the open window that finally had Sherlock stirring and stretching. He opened his eyes to John’s face, tender and grinning at him as he blinked toward the chair.

“Why are you so far awa—“ he began, croaky with sleep, extracting one arm from the jumble of quilts and gesturing at John to join him. But John put a finger to his lips, flicked his eyes toward the window.

And indeed, if he had been any less sleepy Sherlock would have noticed it sooner: a scuffling sound close against the house, and a moment later the poorly-modulated whispering of mischievous boys. Vanessa’s sons, then. Paired with the tobacco smoke, it was a safe conclusion that they were sharing a pilfered fag.

John laid his paper to one side, still with his finger to his lips, and when Sherlock drew his brows together John lowered himself to the mattress, kneeling across carefully so as not to make the bed creak. Sherlock started again to speak, but John muffled it with a hand over Sherlock’s mouth, licking a stripe up the side of his neck. Tonguing the tendons and veins there, biting at his earlobe. Tightening his grip on Sherlock’s mouth when Sherlock threatened to moan.

“They don’t realise there’s anyone in this room,” breathed John into the delicate whorls of Sherlock’s ear as he removed his hand. “It must usually be empty.”

“Obviously,” hissed Sherlock, but he kept his voice down. “What do I care if they know we’re here?”

John craned his neck and flicked his tongue over Sherlock’s nape, listening to Sherlock’s breathing speed up. “You want them to run and tell the others we’re awake?” he whispered. “Ready for breakfast, are you?”

Sherlock groaned, but so quietly that it was the merest vibration against John’s lips where they brushed Sherlock’s neck. John smiled, pulled Sherlock’s pajama top over his head, and tasted silently Sherlock’s lips and jaw and his collarbone, as they listened to the Bell boys finish their stolen cigarette.

Eventually there came the sounds of small shoes on gravel walkways, receding. Sherlock pulled back to look at John. “I don’t think I would have waited for you to wake up, if I’d been in your place,” he said. “But thank you.”

“You were exhausted,” John said. “And I could watch you sleep.”

Sherlock smiled. “Oh yes? Liked that, did you?” he said, idly unbuttoning John’s pajama top.

“Mmm,” affirmed John, as his eyes slid shut.

“And what was keeping you company in the meantime?” Sherlock nodded toward the paper, one arm circling back around John’s ribcage. John’s eyes opened, and he groaned at the memory of the abandoned newspaper column.

“I was reading a — er — highly _coloured_ story in the _Evening News_. A scandal, in the Lis’ neighborhood, actually,” he told Sherlock. He stretched his shoulder to grab the paper without breaking Sherlock’s hold around his chest, then held it out to the side and read: “‘WHITE GIRLS HYPNOTISED BY YELLOW MEN.’” He rolled his eyes. Sherlock chuckled, now running a hand over John’s lower belly, making the cotton of his pajama bottoms nudge around his half-hard cock. John sucked in a breath, and Sherlock repeated the movement.

“I was thinking,” said John, a touch more soberly than one might have expected given Sherlock’s roaming hand, “all the time I was reading this I kept thinking about Miss Summerson — Mrs. Li, I mean. And how, you know —  _oh_ that feels good — how not-hypnotised she was.”

Sherlock snorted and shuffled back a bit, incredulous, letting his hands fall to his sides. “It’s the _Evening News_ , John,” he said, sounding less like the languorous reptile of the last few minutes and more like his usual, caustic self. “What do you expect, objectivity? Journalistic integrity?”

“No, I know,” said John, a bit sheepish as he reached out to trail fingertips along Sherlock’s lower thigh, and followed them with his eyes. “It’s just — I’m not saying I would have believed it, exactly. But now — it’s odd, isn’t it? To think of all the hysteria this kind of thing whips up, over people like Miss Summerson and Mr. Li. I didn’t think about it too much, before.”

Sherlock looked thoughtful for a moment. Then a sly look spread over his face. “No?” he said, leaning back in and taking John’s bottom lip lightly between his teeth, and pulling off slowly. “Did you happen to notice,” he murmured, continuing to lean close to John and speaking almost against his mouth, “their headline of two weeks ago?”

John moved forward to catch Sherlock’s lips with his own, but Sherlock withdrew just enough to evade him, teasing him. “No, I —“ John said, swaying back to his original position, and Sherlock followed him, keeping a scant six inches between their mouths. “I’m — not sure,” John said, staring at Sherlock’s bottom lip. He was inching forward on his shins, almost unconsciously, until his knees were bracketing Sherlock’s.

Sherlock leant forward so that his mouth was next to John’s ear. “And I quote,” he murmured, “Inverts’ Ball…” he moved around to the other ear, “…Corrupts Young Men…” he moved back to the first, “…of Mayfair,” he breathed, and licked John’s earlobe.

“Was that — was that it then?” John gasped. He couldn’t seem to get his breath.

“Mmm,” said Sherlock, pulling John’s pajama top off one shoulder and tonguing at the skin underneath. “Which of us, do you suppose,” he said, “has corrupted the other? Were you hypnotised —“ he pushed the top off the other shoulder, “when you were begging me to get as many of my fingers inside your body as I possibly could?”

John groaned, and Sherlock nipped at his neck. “Bloody hell,” John whispered, inching forward again, and slid his hands under Sherlock’s pajama bottoms, tugging at his hips, wanting him closer.

“Or maybe,” continued Sherlock, murmuring against John’s collarbones now, “ _you_ were the one corrupting _me_. That would explain why I caught one precious _glimpse_ of you in bagged-knee trousers and for the next twenty-four hours I could think of bloody nothing except feeding you my cock.”

John was straddling Sherlock’s lap now, doing his best to grind their hips together, breath ragged. “God, Sherlock,” he said, “do you want that now? Let me — let me suck you off, we can do it up against the wall if you want to see me kneel.”

Sherlock gasped, then broke off his licking of John’s chest, looking oddly taken aback. “Unh,” he said, seemingly at a loss for words, “yes, that would be — good.” Through the haze of want John felt a twinge of puzzlement — not the answer he’d expected.

“Yes?” John made an effort to still his hips; he couldn’t manage, quite.

“ _Yes_. God. John.”

“Sure?” John gritted out, still vaguely aware of something he didn’t understand, and of where that had led before with Sherlock, but his voice was  tight with holding back and his hips were still rutting against Sherlock’s belly. Sherlock growled and pushed up against John’s mouth, twisting out from under him until he was kneeling over John, cupping John’s head in his palms and biting and licking at his mouth. Answer enough.

Then Sherlock was pushing John backward off the bed, still kissing, not breaking contact, pushing him up against Vanessa’s peach-and-rust-painted wall and crowding into him, using his extra inches of height to surround John on all remaining sides. His fingers dug into John’s hips as he pushed him against the painted flowers, and he shoved and thrust until John reached out with an arm and an ankle and with a quick, fluid movement had their positions reversed, reaching up with his mouth to bite at Sherlock’s neck. Sherlock’s knees tried to jackknife.

“Yes?” John asked again, holding him up against the paint. Sherlock made a strangled noise and whispered “yes.” But John just bit down again where Sherlock’s neck met his shoulder, so Sherlock said “please, yes”; but John was still standing, kissing and sucking at the bitten place, so Sherlock said “Jesus God _please_ , I need to see you, John, I want your mouth,” and John breathed a “yes” of his own as he slid to his knees.

He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of Sherlock’s pajama bottoms so that they slid to the floor along with him; Sherlock was near hyperventilating, but he stepped lightly out of them and toed them aside. For a moment John just _looked_. In the shaft of lemon-bright sunlight the pale skin of Sherlock’s belly and thighs glowed warm, all desire and the imprints of summer cotton. His cock stood out from his body, flushed and lovely with a tiny clear bead welling at its tip; at the sight of it John gave a soft moan at the back of his throat. Sherlock clenched and unclenched the hands at his sides. Then he whispered again, “please.” And John swallowed him down.

John got lost a bit then, in the sun-warmed smell of Sherlock’s skin and the weight of him on his tongue; in running a hand up the bones and curves of Sherlock’s hip to hold him; in the slow drag of lips on soft skin; in soft suckling at Sherlock’s tip; and in curling his tongue against the blood-hot tracery of Sherlock’s veins. And at some point unconscious sounds had begun bubbling up out of John’s chest to match those coming from Sherlock’s throat, and his eyes had slid shut, and his fingers had clenched over his own cock, his lips clenched around Sherlock, and he didn’t realise any of it until he heard Sherlock above him choking out “John, no, stop. John.”

John groaned as if in mild pain (Sherlock whimpered), but he pulled off and looked up, eyes unfocused. “What is it?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

Sherlock was flushed and sweat-sheened, and looked like he was struggling for words. “Don’t,” he said, eyes closed and running his hand through John’s hair in the sunlight, “don’t touch yourself, don’t — don’t come, I want it to be me.”

“Yes,” said John, voice shot through with grit, “all right, just — give me a moment,” as he rested his forehead against Sherlock’s thigh and breathed hard. Then he stretched both arms up to Sherlock’s hips, anchoring his hands. He curled his legs under himself so as to avoid the friction offered by Sherlock’s legs, and lowered his mouth back to Sherlock’s cock as Sherlock’s hands kept their hold on his hair.

Less distracted, he could take in what Sherlock was saying, and the chant of “So beautiful, Christ, so much,” and “John I can’t believe —” and “again, god, _again_ ” in Sherlock’s honey-and-rocksalt voice was getting him close even without the touching. So he hollowed his cheeks and — “yes” — cupped his tongue around the ridged underside and — “ _again_ ” — sucked hard as he — “ _John!_ ” — took as much as he could, and Sherlock’s hands were clenching hard in John’s hair as he pulsed into John’s mouth.

Sherlock’s knees finally gave out then, and he sagged to the floor, with John still halfway holding him up so that he took John down backwards as he fell. They were tangled together on the hardwood floor of Charleston Farmhouse, with John’s pajama-clad leg between Sherlock’s naked ones, and John’s hips were twitching up into Sherlock’s heavy boneless weight. As soon as Sherlock was conscious again, he was muttering into John’s skin “You waited for me,” and  “You’re going to let me,” and “You’re perfect, John, perfect,” dragging himself up so that he could look at John’s face where John was biting his own bottom lip and trying not to beg.

Sherlock tugged John’s pajama bottoms down and tossed them up onto the bed. He looked back at John and his eyes were shining. “What do you want?” he said. John’s hips bucked again, against air. He shook his head, overwhelmed.

“Anything,” Sherlock went on. “Should I get the —“ he nodded toward his trunk, but John groaned.

“I’ll never last,” he said. “Just — just your hands, give me your beautiful hands.” 

So Sherlock reached out one long, pale hand to wrap around John. He slid the other up John’s chest to cup the back of his head, and John arched his back off the floor completely as Sherlock stroked him and kissed his shoulder and his cheekbones and his mouth, which opened to pant “Sherlock” and “yes” and “ _Sherlock_ ” before he pushed into Sherlock’s fist and came and came.

  


***

  


“All right,” John said, as his breath evened out where he lay on the floor, “what was it?”

“What was what?” said Sherlock, still a bit breathless himself. He was still running his hands all over John’s buzzing skin.

John rolled his eyes. “Don’t be thick,” he said. “You know exactly what I mean. Why were you surprised when I wanted to suck you off? Seemed like the next logical step from where I was sitting.”

Sherlock looked away. “I — nothing,” he said, but John said “Holmes” in his warning voice, and Sherlock looked back to meet his eyes.

“It’s stupid,” Sherlock said, chewing on his lip and swinging himself into a sitting position, facing John and hugging his knees. “I just — I — suppose I always felt a bit at a loss, sexually. Even before, when I was — when I had the opportunity. The last time was — Cambridge, actually.” He cleared his throat. John put out a hand, rubbed the top of Sherlock’s bare foot. Thinking, Sherlock had _always_ had the opportunity. Looking like he did. So he must mean, ‘when I last indulged.’

“I never knew quite how to approach it, and — I was reading chemistry at the time, spending most of my spare time in the labs, and so I got in the habit of — the closest model I had was, um —“ Sherlock squirmed.

John was watching him narrowly now. He opened his mouth, slowly. “You ran sexual scenarios — like scientific experiments? Even back then?” he said, and Sherlock exhaled in a rush.

“It assuaged my anxiety,” he said, “to have a plan, controlled parameters, a map of how things would go. _Not_ ,” he hurried to add, “because I think of you as an experiment, John. Or — not like that,” he amended.

John nodded, slowly. “You didn’t know the roadmap last night,” he said, sounding the words out, and Sherlock shook his head.

“It was the first time,” he said into his knees, not meeting John’s eyes. “The first time when I wasn’t in control — when I let someone else — and today was the first time I let someone change my mind.”

John’s hand circled Sherlock’s ankle, possessively. He had understood, he’d thought, about Charlotte Whitmore’s letters. But he hadn’t grasped just how much it took for Sherlock to cede control. And the extent to which Sherlock’s instincts of self-preservation really _hadn’t_ been specific to John, or to John’s history. Something eased in his chest; and was replaced by a tenderness as wide as his arms could hold. 

“ _Thank you_ ,” he said, squeezing Sherlock’s ankle. He waited until Sherlock looked around, met his eyes. They stayed like that for a minute or two, just looking, and then John sat up and kissed, very gently, at Sherlock’s worried mouth.

“And how did you come up with these — scenarios?” John asked, eventually, having broken away from the kiss and sat back on his heels. Sherlock laughed, still nervous but also relieved.

“Reading. Fantasies. Reworking little additions suggested by my lovers’ actions. The, um —” he gestured up at the bed, “this teasing and whispering bit was something someone tried on me, once.”

Sherlock still looked slightly mortified, but John was inclining to amusement. “I see,” he said, mock-serious. “And, um, how was this morning going to play out, if you don’t mind my asking? Before I threw a wrench in the works by offering to get on my knees.” His mouth was quirking up.

Sherlock squirmed. “I’m sorry, John,” he said, “I didn’t mean — it’s just — old habits are hard to break.”

“Shh,” said John, protective, moving forward to touch Sherlock’s face. “It’s not as uncommon as you might think. You just take it a bit farther than most. But honestly, how was this going to end?” Sherlock sighed, fidgeted, and John fought a smile. 

“With you — with you sodding me,” Sherlock muttered, looking up at the ceiling, “face to face, you sitting back against the wall and me in your lap, legs around your hips, kissing you from above.”

John couldn’t stifle a little moan. His fingers dug into Sherlock’s thigh. “Soon,” he said. 

Sherlock smiled, slow. “You don’t mind?” he murmured. “I know it could seem a bit — um — cunning. Like —“ he shrugged, “secret decisions.”

John traced the lines of Sherlock’s lips with a fingertip, smiling like his heart would break. “Tell me all of them,” he said, “and we can decide together.”

  


***

  


Keynes was stopped short, in his bustling progress down the corridor, by the sight of the door to the northeast bedroom. He halted a moment upon seeing it; looked away; looked back. Then he smiled, pivoted in a brisk half-circle, and retraced his steps out to the garden.

Strachey was sitting chatting to Vanessa. He startled visibly when Keynes leaned over his shoulder and murmured in his ear. “You were telling tales on me to Doctor Watson, weren’t you, Lytton?” he said.

Strachey’s eyes slid sideways and his mouth quirked under his beard. “Hullo Maynard,” he said aloud, affecting nonchalance. “Thought you’d gone in for your book. What sorts of tales might those be?”

Keynes didn’t straighten up, or raise his voice. “Tales of my Cambridge days,” he murmured again into Strachey’s ear. “Tales of my rooms. At Cambridge.”

Strachey’s head snapped around, a smile playing around his eyes and mouth now. “I — er,” he said, “may have mentioned them. Dreadfully neat they always were, Maynard, for a university student.”

“You know that’s not what I mean,” came the low murmur in his ear, and then: “Come and see.” And he straightened up, offering Strachey his arm, and Strachey took it. When they stepped through the door into the house, Keynes put a finger to his lips. Strachey nodded. 

And there it was, at the end of the corridor. A coded signal Strachey had once resented bitterly (Hobby, then Norton, then Duncan), but which he hadn’t seen in years: a small white envelope wedged between the door and the jamb at pull height, and soft sounds from within. He felt a crooked grin spread over his face, and looked up at Keynes, and the next moment they were both collapsed against the wall of the corridor, hands over mouths, laughing and laughing and laughing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. The background on Bloomsbury relations at this time: Thoby Stephen was Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell’s brother, who died of typhoid in 1906. Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room, which she was starting to work on around this time, was partially based on his life. Clive Bell was married to Vanessa but they were both open about their lovers; he was having an affair with Mary Hutchinson. Vanessa had a daughter Angelica (who would have been two at this point, and is presumably being cared for by her nanny during these scenes) with Duncan Grant, with whom in 1920 she would have been still in love but no longer sleeping. Vanessa’s two sons with Clive, Julien and Quentin, were around 10 and 12.
> 
> 2\. The device of the missing figure in Vanessa’s painting (representing a sitter who has since died) is cadged from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, in which Lily Bart is painting the Ramsays’ house, with Mrs. Ramsay sitting outside it:  
> 
>
>> Taking out a pen-knife, Mr. Bankes tapped the canvas with the bone handle. What did she wish to indicate by the triangular purple shape, "just there"? he asked.
>
>> It was Mrs. Ramsay reading to James, she said. She knew his objection — that no one could tell it for a human shape. But she had made no attempt at likeness, she said. For what reason had she introduced them then? he asked. Why indeed?—except that if there, in that corner, it was bright, here, in this, she felt the need of darkness. Simple, obvious, commonplace, as it was, Mr. Bankes was interested. Mother and child then—objects of universal veneration, and in this case the mother was famous for her beauty—might be reduced, he pondered, to a purple shadow without irreverence.
>
>> But the picture was not of them, she said. Or, not in his sense. There were other senses too in which one might reverence them.
> 
>   
> Years later, after Mrs. Ramsay’s death, Lily goes back and completes the painting.
> 
> 3\. “Hobby” is Arthur Hobhouse, and “Norton” refers to Henry Tertius James Norton. Both were mutual conquests of Keynes and Strachey while they were at Cambridge together.
> 
> 4\. “White Girls Hypnotised by Yellow Men” was an actual headline in the Evening News, on November 5 1920.
> 
> 5\. The headline about this specific Inverts’ Ball is invented, but [this](http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/jul/03/gayrights.world) article in the Guardian discusses the phenomenon, and the sensationalist headlines that followed a raid on one in 1933. The article points out that “Paradoxically, prurient tabloid articles about the case may have given strength to other gay men by showing them they were not alone. Dr Houlbrook cited the case of a Liverpool man arrested for wearing drag, who said the trial had inspired him to "experiment".


End file.
